The Neverending Story

You know, one fantasy novel I never hear much talked about these days is The Neverending Story. Published originally in German as Die Unendliche Geschichtein in 1979, it became popular here in the United States in the eighties thanks to that terrible, terrible kids' movie of the same (except for a capitalized E) name. Of course I loved that movie (which is terrible) at the time, and especially that sweet theme song. But just read the book (which I did when I was a teenager) and you'll see what a hatchet job the movie is. The author, Michael Ende, would seem to have agreed with that assessment. Let's not even discuss the sequel.

I recently read the book to my kids. I'd forgotten what a mind-bending piece of meta it is. We read it as originally published, with the page-size capital letters at the beginnings of the chapters (from A for Chapter 1 to Z for Chapter 26) and the dual colors of ink (red and green) to help you navigate between metafictional modes. I'm not exactly sure what Ende was getting at with all those layers of self-reference, so here's where you get to see me puzzle that out.

If you haven't read The Neverending Story, watch out, because I'm about to spoil it all, though I don't think it's really the kind of book that gets spoiled by your knowing the plot ahead of time.

Bastian, a doughy, wimpy schoolboy with a deceased mother and an emotionally frigid father, steals a strange book from an enigmatic dealer, and holes up with it in the schoolhouse attic. In it reads the adventures of Atreyu the Greenskin, the chosen savior of Fantastica, which is being devoured by the Nothing while the Childlike Empress languishes from a mysterious illness. (Unlike in the movie, the Nothing literally looks like nothing, as though you'd gone blind.) (The clouds in the movie look pretty cool, though.) The Empress, it seems, must be given a new name by a human, but humans have stopped coming to Fantastica. We gradually learn that the purpose of Atreyu's quest and all his sufferings are solely to get Bastian, the human reader, interested in the book. At the Magic Mirror Gate, it's revealed that Bastian and Atreyu are, in some sense, the same person.

Bastian, in his reluctance to say the (slightly goofy) name he's thought up, forces the Childlike Empress to go to the Old Man of Wandering Mountain and have the story told again from the beginning, within the story itself. Here (and elsewhere) I catch just a hint of both Nietzsche (the eternal return) and – just maybe! – The Worm Ouroboros. AURYN, the talisman borne by Atreyu and the symbol of the book as a whole, consists of two snakes biting one another's tails…

Once Bastian says the name (I'll let you read the book to find out what it is), he finds himself in Fantastica. In 100% green ink now, he cuts an impetuous and increasingly disturbing swath across a succession of bizarre landscapes in an adventure that reminds me a bit of A Voyage to Arcturus. The one command laid upon him is DO WHAT YOU WISH, which seems great at first. But it turns out that each wish costs him a memory. He starts to become insufferable as he forgets what he once was.

What everyone tells him, though, is that he has to go right through Fantastica, making whatever wishes come to him and following wherever they lead. Whenever he stops wishing, he starts going in circles. He tries to make himself emperor (no one can see the Childlike Empress twice), which doesn't go too well, and almost results in his becoming the demented resident of a city of mad would-be emperors superintended by a creepy monkey. Eventually the wishes divest him of everything – his very last memories – and leave him an empty shell.

The strange thing about The Neverending Story is that, despite its having more layers than a premium nacho plate, it's enjoyable as a story in its own right. The world of Fantastica is convincingly portrayed, and Ende's powers of invention are seemingly inexhaustible. One of the main pleasures in reading the book is experiencing all the surprising and beautiful things he comes up with. The story ends with…well, with something heartwarming and sentimental. I won't knock it, but if that were the point of the novel then it wouldn't have the power it has.

To me a lot of it seems to be a parable about storytelling. Bastian is the one person in Fantastica who can tell stories. The stories he tells come true as the tells them, but there are always unintended consequences: dragons that cause suffering, clown-butterflies who vandalize. What's more, Bastian's path of wishes and growing lack of self-knowledge make him less and less capable of telling stories at all.

The Childlike Empress is portrayed as indifferent to good and evil, but her mandate, to go on wishing, while not exactly "good," is fitting, appropriate, right. It's what Bastian's got to do. Similarly, telling a story is a spiritually draining process, but the teller must go where it leads. If it's worth telling it's got a certain logic that has to be obeyed. In her indifference, I think the Empress is merely Story personified. Morality for the characters in a story is one thing; the "morality" of the storyteller (which is neither more nor less than the virtue of good craftsmanship) is another. Someone I follow online recently said something to the effect of, what kind of person takes pleasure in the misery inflected upon a character by a cruel author? I suppose it's possible to get a sadistic thrill in reading a novel, but for me it's really more the pleasure of seeing a pattern fall into place.

As I said, telling a story is a spiritually draining process. Literally, perhaps: it sucks something out of you. It's also fraught with peril. In setting yourself up as the emperor of your (invented) world, you  may find yourself doing violence to your own conceits and being relegated at last to the city of demented might-have-beens.

But maybe I'm just saying all that because I've been going in circles myself lately…

Eternal Return

Thereupon distilled from the neck of the alembic a white oil incombustible, and the King dipped his rod in that oil and described round the seven-pointed star on the floor the figure of the worm Ouroboros, that eateth his own tail. 

Like a black eagle surveying earth from some high mountain the King passed by in his majesty. His byrny was of black chain mail, its collar, sleeves, and skirt edged with plates of dull gold set with hyacinths and black opals. His hose were black, cross-gartered with bands of sealskin trimmed with diamonds. On his left thumb was his great signet ring fashioned in gold in the semblance of the worm Ouroboros that eateth his own tail: the bezel of the ring the head of the worm, made of a peach-coloured ruby of the bigness of a sparrow's egg. His cloak was woven of the skins of black cobras stitched together with gold wire, its lining of black silk sprinkled with dust of gold. The iron crown of Witchland weighed on his brow, the claws of the crab erect like horns; and the sheen of its jewels was many-coloured like the rays of Sirius on a clear night of frost and wind at Yule-tide.  

— The Worm Ouroboros 

A friend recently facebooked about Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence. I read Nietzsche from time to time, mostly because I find him entertaining, and good fodder for story-writing. But he had quite a few keen insights, too. At any rate, the discussion brought to my mind the following passage from Beyond Good and Evil:

…the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo [from the beginning] – not only to himself but to the whole play and spectacle… [Beyond Good and Evil, Section 56, trans. Walter Kaufmann]

There are a number of other references to the idea in Nietzsche's works. My friend was thinking about a possible influence on Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury ("literature"? yawn!) but of course what it made me think of was…The Worm Ouroboros.

The worm Ouroboros is, as we all know, the worm that eateth its own tail, and this is the structure of the eponymous romance. (Spoiler alert.) Our heroes, the Homeric supermen Juss, Goldry Bluszco, Spitfire, and Brandoch Daha, having defeated their dastardly enemies at long last, have in fact defeated themselves in ridding the world of strife and conflict, which to them is the very game that makes life worth living. They realize this, and lament it, bringing about the appalling miracle that takes them from the story's tail to its teeth.

Queen Sophonisba covered her eyes, saying, "My lords, I see no more. The crystal curdles within like foam in a whirlpool under a high force in rainy weather. Mine eyes grow sore with watching. Let us row back, for the night is far spent and I am weary." 

But Juss stayed her and said, "Let me dream yet awhile. The double pillar of the world, that member thereof which we, blind instruments of inscrutable Heaven, did shatter, restored again? From this time forth to maintain, I and he, his and mine, ageless and deathless for ever, for ever our high contention whether he or we should be great masters of all the earth? If this he but phantoms, O Queen, thou'st 'ticed us to the very heart of bitterness. This we could have missed, unseen and unimagined: but not now. Yet how were it possible the Gods should relent and the years return?" 

But the Queen spake, and her voice was like the falling shades of evening, pulsing with hidden splendour, as of a sense of wakening starlight alive behind the fading blue. "This King," she said, "in the wickedness of his impious pride did wear on his thumb the likeness of that worm Ouroboros, as much as to say his kingdom should never end. Yet was he, when the appointed hour did come, thundered down into the depths of Hell. And if now he be raised again and his days continued, 'tis not for his virtue but for your sake, my lords, whom the Almighty Gods do love. Therefore I pray you possess your hearts awhile with humility before the most high Gods, and speak no unprofitable words. Let us row back."

And the next morning, wonder of wonders, the episode that began the chronicle recurs, and the reader contemplates the heroes' "happy" fate, doomed, deathless in glory, endlessly to repeat the events of the story with infinite variations. It's the perfect "ending," terrifyingly joyous, both satisfying and appalling in its adherence to the story's inner logic and philosophical outlook. It could very well be the best ending to any fantasy novel ever written – a vision of a strange and alien moral topography that may be fine to visit, but not someplace you'd ever want to live.

The superhuman lords and ladies that populate the book's pages are Nietzschean heroes, joyous, strong, carefree, and utterly unconcerned with the peasantry. We encounter peasants on only one occasion, when Eddison adopts the curious narrative device of relating the upshot of a battle through the words of a soldier returning home to his farm. Actually, for someone bent on celebrating the martial deeds well-armed aristocrats, Eddison is strangely reticent to describe an actual battle. We have this second-hand account of the battle at Krothering Side, for instance; the sea-battle off Melikaphkhaz in the Impland seas and the final battle before the gates of Carcë in waterish Witchland take place off-stage as well, while the extermination of the Ghouls that forms the novel's thin backstory is related only through brief allusions. In a way the device reminds one of Elizabethan drama, which is not unfitting, but no Shakespearean actor ever scaled an icy mountain, rode a hippogriff, or fought a brain-eating mantichore, either. So it seems more likely that Eddison simply didn't feel that his talents were equal to the task. Which, to my mind, is just as well; book battles usually read like accounts of volleyball matches to me.

But back to Nietzsche. I'm not certain how much of a direct influence on The Worm Ouroboros Nietzsche actually was. People always talk of Eddison's characters as following a Nietzschean moral code, which I suppose they do, but both authors were really looking to Homer's heroes as exemplars, and you could just as well call the Worm's moral code Homeric. However, this idea of the great da capo and eternal return makes it seem more likely that Eddison did know something of Nietzsche's philosophy.

Tolkien, as is well known, was an admirer of Eddison's fantasies, despite adhering to the exact antithesis of Eddison's personal philosophy, so we'll let him have the final word.

I read the works of [E. R.] Eddison, long after they appeared; and I once met him… Eddison thought what I admire 'soft' (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that, corrupted by an evil and indeed silly 'philosophy', he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty. Incidentally, I thought his nomenclature slipshod and often inept. In spite of all of which, I still think of him as the greatest and most convincing writer of 'invented worlds' that I have read.*

* From a letter to Caroline Everett dated 24 June 1957, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1981.

Strange Islands

In my last post, I discussed Martin Buber's philosophy of I-Thou and my own attempts to people my world with minor gods, concluding with a promise to apply these ideas to fantastic literature.

What brought all of this back to my mind was a reading of The Spiritual Canticle by St. John of the Cross. St. John is, they say, one of the great poets of Spanish literature; his Spiritual Canticle is an exposition of his poem of the same name ("Cántico Espiritual"). To me, Stanzas 14 and 15 stand out in particular:

Mi Amado, las montañas,
los valles solitarios nemorosos,
las ínsulas extrañas,
los ríos sonorosos,
el silbo de los aires amorosos,

la noche sosegada
en par de los levantes de la aurora,
la música callada,
la soledad sonora,
la cena que recrea y enamora.

In my deep and extensive knowledge of sixteenth-century Spanish, and lamentable liability to poetic licence, I render this thus:

My Beloved, towering range,
deep-delved lonesome wood,
islands strange,
thunder-flood,
zephyr's nocturne of love,

the tranquil dim
of dawn's lifting aperture,
silent hymn,
solitude's laughter,
feast that feeds and enraptures.

Regarding Line 3 of Stanza 14, John says:

Strange islands are girt by the sea; they are also, because of the sea, distant and unknown to the commerce of men. They produce things very different from those with which we are conversant, in strange ways, and with qualities hitherto unknown, so as to surprise those who behold them, and fill them with wonder. Thus, then, by reason of the great and marvelous wonders, and the strange things that come to our knowledge, far beyond the common notions of men, which the soul beholds in God, it calls Him the strange islands. 

We say of a man that he is strange for one of two reasons: either because he withdraws himself from the society of his fellows, or because he is singular or distinguished in his life and conduct. For these two reasons together God is called strange by the soul. He is not only all that is strange in undiscovered islands, but His ways, judgments, and works are also strange, new, and marvelous to men. 

It is nothing wonderful that God should be strange to men who have never seen Him, seeing that He is also strange to the holy angels and the souls who see Him; for they neither can nor shall ever see Him perfectly... [O]nly to Himself is He neither strange nor new.

God is strange; indeed, he is much stranger than even the angels could ever imagine. A point often forgotten by the dogma-bound. There is hope here for me. The strange islands of my own mind, which find their way into my stories, are, I suppose, not the strangeness of which John speaks, but perhaps they touch those outer waters as the net of islands and shifting shadows ring Tolkien's blessed Aman. Then again, perhaps not.

Regarding Line 3 of Stanza 15, John says:

In this silence and tranquility of the night, and in this knowledge of the divine light, the soul discerns a marvelous arrangement and disposition of God's wisdom in the diversities of His creatures and operations. All these, and each one of them, have a certain correspondence with God, whereby each, by a voice peculiar to itself, proclaims what there is in itself of God, so as to form a concert of sublimest melody, transcending all the harmonies of the world. This is the silent music, because it is knowledge tranquil and calm, without audible voice; and thus the sweetness of music and the repose of silence are enjoyed in it. The soul says that the Beloved is silent music, because this harmony of spiritual music is in Him understood and felt.

This calls to mind the mysterious Psalm 19:

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
     and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
     and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
     their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
     and their words to the end of the world.

It seems paradoxical. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. But their voice and words are their very being. By being what they are, they speak. Try to "listen" to them on any other wavelength, and you miss it. Or worse, manufacture their speech for yourself.

For me this is a cogent truth of practical import, for I tried – really tried – to hear the music of the spheres for many years. I'm currently reading A Wrinkle in Time to my kids, and enjoying it very much; but I was almost obsessed with it and Madeleine L'Engle's other books when I was about nine or ten, and, in hindsight, I think they had a tremendous influence on how I saw the world. It wasn't until I finally gave up trying to hear the "voices of the stars" that the cosmos came rushing back like a breaker crashing ashore. St. Augustine speaks of something similar in Book X of his Confessions, in his questioning of the deeps and the heavens, and their answering him in their beauty of order.

This is the kind of thing I think about while composing my sword-and-planet tales.

As I said above, I'm often really looking for a certain kind of silence in fantasy. It's not easy to put your finger on it, but lack of silence seems tied to the flippant or frivolous use of fantastic elements, to the failure to reserve these things for their proper places, to the devolution of the invented milieu into a muddled slurry which bores in its very freedom from restraint. The presence of silence brings about the recovery of which Tolkien speaks, a reconciliation with the universe.

Many modern fantasists have understood this. Their work is characterized by a spirit of listening, a sense of wonder, a willingness to go along and let things happen and see what the world has to show us. Various passages come to mind: Koshtra Belorn; the Night Land; Middle-Earth; Perelandra; Earthsea. Mystical silence isn't limited to fantasy, but fantasy is uniquely equipped to make the most of it. It's not something that can be established through the mere manipulation of material elements, and the works of your safe genre writers possess it to a much lesser degree. For there the sense of wonder has been worn away by familiarity, and the startlement that cleanses the eyes of the soul and brings recovery is no longer possible. The reader's heart becomes jaded, and she looks for new sources, of which this world contains all too few.

In these days of isolation and frustration, I admit that I find myself drawn more to hard-boiled writers like Hammett and Chandler, or to amoral S&S and weird horror by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Lieber, or Michael Moorcock. But perhaps here, too, there is a kind of silence. In Hammett, for instance, there's his unrelenting desire to pare away everything but the naked skeleton of the narrative. The utter absence of any kind of moralizing (which is really just chatter in a story) comes as a great relief. To quote Nietzsche on the point:

The desert…where the strong, independent spirits withdraw and become lonely – oh, how different it looks from the way educated people imagine a desert! – for in some cases they themselves are this desert, these educated people.

To be continued!

Half-Breeds Like Us

In which I muse on my mixed ethnic background, the sense of isolation resulting from such a background, the history of negative mixed-ethnic stereotypes in letters and logic, and the weird ways in which these play a role in my writing.

Wagner's Hagen: half man, half dwarf.

Raymond Chandler's Playback is not his most well-known novel. It's meandering and depressing and mildly offensive, though it might have made a good noir film in the hands of the right director. In the course of this particular quest for truth, Marlowe finds himself extracting information from a parking garage attendant:

I let the door close and stood outside it waiting and a lean man in a long white coat came around the corner. He wore glasses, had a skin the color of cold oatmeal and hollow tired eyes. There was something Mongolian about his face, something south-of-the-border, something Indian, and something darker than that. His black hair was flat on a narrow skull.

Marlowe questions him, using his dope habit as leverage. In the course of their conversation the man reveals his ethnicity:

"You're not Mex?" 

"I'm part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part Filipino, and part n****r. You'd hate to be me."

Afterward:

He turned away and I went through the door and rang for the elevator. He was a queer duck, the attendant, very queer. Kind of interesting, though. And kind of sad, too. One of the sad, one of the lost.

Later on, Marlowe goes to find him at his house.

At the far corner of Polton's Lane there was an automobile agency. I followed its high blank wall, looking at broken crates, piles of cartons, trash drums, dusty parking spaces, the back yard of elegance. I counted the buildings. It was easy. No questions to ask. A light burned in the small window of a tiny frame cottage that had long ago been somebody's simple home. The cottage had a wooden porch with a broken railing. It had been painted once, but that was in the remote past before the shops swallowed it up. Once it may even have had a garden. The shingles of the roof were warped. The front door was  a dirty mustard yellow.

It goes on like this for a while. Then comes the inevitable discovery:

The man's scuffed toes almost touched the floor. His head was up in the darkness inches from the two by four that held up the rooof. He was hanging by a black wire, probably a piece of electric light wire. The toes of his feet were pointed down as if they reached to stand on tiptoe. [...]

I closed the door on him. I didn't go back in the house. As I went along the side towards Polton's Lane, that handsome residential street, the parrot inside the shack heard me and screeched "Quién es? Quién es? Quién es?"

A cruel but effective and not unsympathetic portrait of a person relegated to the interstices of society.

*     *     *

I am, as I have mentioned before, of rather mixed ancestry. Two of my grandparents were born in Puerto Rico, and their genes were a mixture of Spanish, Native American, and West African; my other grandfather came of Greek immigrants who entered the country by way of Ellis Island, and my other grandmother came of plains-dwelling Bohemians like characters in a Willa Cather novel. Practically speaking, what all this rich heritage means in is that I'm an outsider in every party.

When my Greek grandfather married my Bohemian grandmother, he was for a time persona non grata with her family. Her parents refused at first to let him in the house, or so the story goes. Being quite a likeable guy, though, he eventually won everyone over; actually, he became so integrated in the town that he hosted a polka program on the local radio station. They eventually settled elsewhere, and my grandmother had nine children – think My Big Fat Greek Wedding – while her brother had seven, giving rise to two very large but very distinct branches. The first is scattered from the West Coast to the East Coast; the second has tended to stay close to home.

A couple summers ago I went to a reunion in the old hometown. It was friendly, but I could sense a certain amount of tension. I suppose it didn't help that the cookout took place in a park dedicated to Hermann (Arminius, the titular protector of the Sons of Hermann), in the shadow of a terrifying statue of the hero that looms over the whole town from atop a towering dome, a kind of shrine where devotional souvenirs are sold. A relative lamented to me that her children aren't pure-blooded, as her husband isn't entirely of Germanic extraction. My children are purely human, and that's about it.

But back to my grandfather. On his own side he was regarded as having run off to marry an outsider. He made a choice – a sacrifice – to turn his back on his Greek heritage and embrace American patriotism like no other person I know. Similarly, my Puerto Rican grandparents raised my father to speak English, not Spanish. This was a conscious decision to integrate. My great-grandfather was a railroad worker; my grandfather was a sailor and airman and hardware store manager; my dad was a soldier and science teacher and counselor; and I'm what I am, such as it is. I guess we're slowly working our way in.

Incidentally, though, I'm not criticizing those who choose to retain a strong cultural identity in this country. On the contrary, I have an acute sympathy for them, because I know what happens when you lose it, and find yourself falling between chairs. I've sometimes regretted my family's sacrifice. But then again, I like existing.

*     *     *

There is a tendency, even among the diversity-minded, to view ethnicity as a matter of discrete categories or sets. To them, the "other" about which they are so solicitous tends to be a pure-blooded member of an ethnic minority, a view reinforced by bureaucratic check-boxes. In such a world the half-breed has no place. But of course ethnicity is really more like a collection of fuzzy sets.

In Aristotelian logic and classical set theory, an individual either does or does not belong to a set. The concept of the fuzzy set, developed by Lotfi Zadeh in the 1960s, allows for degrees of membership. Membership is valued as a real number μ such that 0 ≤ μ ≤ 1. In contrast to this, membership in ordinary or "crisp" sets is valued as 0 (not belonging) or 1 (belonging). In a rigorous sense, fuzzy logic is, I think, still insufficient to model ethnicity, because there clearly is a discrete element to genetics – inheritance is "digital" rather than "analog" (as, I believe, Mike Flynn put it, though I can't find the passage now) – and no ethnic category has a well-defined center, as though springing from a single progenitor like mankind from Adam. But as a metaphor, the concept at least captures the fact that we're not dealing with a black-and-white issue.

Thayer Watkins, whose website I consulted while reading about fuzzy sets, opines that Lotfi Zadeh's ethnicity is itself an example of a fuzzy set:

The question of Zadeh's ethnicity is difficult to answer sharply. His father was Turkish-Iranian (Azerbaijani) and his mother was Russian.

Dr. Watkins' site has some (alas, broken) links to discussions of the art of Paul Klee, a subject that fascinates me. It's interesting and possibly significant that the same people who were so fixated on the idea of racial purity were also the most suspicious of visual abstraction. (I wrote a bit about "degenerate art" here, and defended the art of Paul Klee here; these were part of a larger essay.) It's also interesting that A. E. van Vogt, who helped to popularize non-Aristotelian logic in the 1940s with his Null-A books (which I'm very fond of), apparently grew up speaking Low German in a Russian Mennonite community in Canada; whether he was ethnically diverse I don't know, but certainly he was personally acquainted with the idea of degrees of membership. It's the pitiably thalamic Enro the Reds of this world who feel the need to call black black and white white and fear or anathemize anything that falls between.

*     *     *

I sometimes read Nietzsche. How great a philosopher he was is debatable, but he had a penetrating insight, and was sensitive to the trends of his times and what was to come. At any rate I've found him useful. Henri de Lubac's Drama of Atheist Humanism has been helpful in this regard.

Nietzsche discusses the mixture of races at some length in Beyond Good and Evil. To wit:

In an age of disintegration that mixes races indiscriminately, human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest. Such human beings of late cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings: their most profound desire is that the war they are should come to an end. Happiness appears to them, in agreement with a tranquilizing…medicine and way of thought, pre-eminently as the happiness of resting, of not being disturbed, of satiety, of finally obtained unity, as a 'sabbath of sabbaths.'

It's hard to read this without reflecting on the way history went in the following century. There were the Nazi atrocities, and all else pales beside them, but even in our own country we had anti-miscegenation laws and the eugenics movement. Might not the still-current suspicion of the mixing of races be traced to the same origin? It's a little depressing to reflect that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in Democracy in America that equality would never dawn until intermarriage created a smooth gradation between the races.

Anyway, Nietzsche goes on to describe how this leveling process sets the stage for the coming of the beautiful predatory one, the "Alcibiades" of history:

But when the opposition and war in such a nature have the effect of one more charm and incentive of life – and if, moreover, in addition to his powerful and irreconcilable drives, a real mastery and subtlety in waging war against oneself, in other words, self-control, self-outwitting, has been inherited or cultivated, too – then those magical, incomprehensible, and unfathomable ones arise, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and seduction… They appear in precisely the same ages when that weaker type with its desire for rest comes to the fore: both types belong together and owe their origin to the same causes. 

He later discusses Frederick II, better known as Frederick the Great:

Men were missing; and he [Frederick William I] suspected with the most bitter dismay that his own son [Frederick II] was not man enough… He saw his son surrender to atheism, to esprit, to the hedonistic frivolity of clever Frenchmen: in the background he saw that great vampire, the spider of skepticism; he suspected the incurable misery of a heart that is no longer hard enough for evil or good, of a broken will that no longer commands, no longer is capable of commanding. Meanwhile there grew up in his son that much more dangerous and harder new type of skepticism – who knows how much it owed precisely to the hatred of the father and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude? – the skepticism of audacious manliness which is most closely related to the genius for war and conquest… This skepticism despises and nevertheless seizes; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe but does not lose itself in the process; it gives the spirit dangerous freedom, but it is severe on the heart…

These ideas are profoundly repellent and fascinating to me. Repellent, because I embody everything Nietzsche saw in the degeneration of civilization: I'm not strong or ruthless or masterful, I'm racially impure, I have a developmental disability, I believe in the Beatitudes he so despised, &c. Fascinating, because they have a certain inner consistency and dramatic effectiveness, and even a romantic aura, if you're one of the pure-blooded. 

*     *     *

My ruminations on the subject gave rise to a pulp adventure story called "The Goblin King's Concubine." The plot outline was suggested by the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, mother of Quanah Parker, a story that also inspired Robert E. Howard's "The Vale of Lost Women," which has some disquieting racial elements. "Concubine" is the tale of a half-breed who falls between cultures. Write what you know, as they say. The character I identify with is Zilla. Maybe I shouldn't admit that! It's a dark tale and obviously made some people uncomfortable. But despite its origin it doesn't have a message or point. It's just a story written for entertainment.

And the half-goblin Zilla's biography extends far beyond it. He goes back almost twenty years in the history of my imagination, appeared in my earlier story, "Misbegotten," and plays a role in my forthcoming novel, Dragonfly. He is inspired by Nietzsche's Frederick the Great as well as Dostoevsky's Nikolai Stavrogin (The Possessed), Wagner's half-dwarf Hagen (Götterdämmerung), and, I must admit, Tolkien's "ill-favored" half-orc southerner in Bree. He comes from a desire to explode, from inside out, the negative stereotype of the suspicious half-breed, a role I've found myself assigned more than once. And by explode, I mean expand and dissect. But again, the objective is entertainment.

You see, I could write moralizing stories about virtuous half-breeds misunderstood and mistreated by their wicked pure-bred fellow citizens, but that would be obvious, stupid, and boring. No, my half-breed is not just suspicious and sneaky, but bad-ass, a great-souled warlock and conqueror who, far from being ill-favored, is so beautiful he has to wear a veil like Moses coming down from the mountain just to keep people from worshiping him.

So, yeah, Dragonfly, coming soon to an online retailer near you.

The Goblin King's Concubine

I'm pleased to report that my story "The Goblin King's Concubine" has just appeared in Issue 129 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. BCS is an excellent venue for literary adventure fantasy, and I'm honored to have my work appear there for the second time.

The story itself is in part a subversive tribute to Robert E. Howard. It's inspired by the "rescue" of Cynthia Ann Parker (mother of Quanah Parker) from the Comanches by Sul Ross and the Texas Rangers, an event also echoed in Howard's tale "The Vale of Lost Women." Howard's latent racism, which unfortunately mars several of his stories, is in evidence here, and my story explores chauvinism and otherness (and goblin villages and lycopod forests). But I also admire Howard as a small-town Texan who inhabited his locality through speculative fiction; as a writer, he stands head and shoulders above his various imitators and posthumous collaborators.

The character of Zilla, by the bye, is inspired by certain (to me, chilling) passages of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, e.g.:

Meanwhile there grew up in his son that much more dangerous and harder new type of skepticism—who knows how much it owed precisely to the hatred of the father and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude?—the skepticism of audacious manliness which is most closely related to the genius for war and conquest… This skepticism despises and nevertheless seizes; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe but does not lose itself in the process; it gives the spirit dangerous freedom, but it is severe on the heart…

They say that you shouldn't reveal the "bones" that went into making the soup of a story, but I presume that people clicking the link to this blog are interested in such things. Anyway, all of this concerns the matter; the form is something else entirely.

The Inner Mountain

"But when [Antony] saw himself beset by many, and not suffered to withdraw himself according to his intent as he wished…he considered and set off to go into the upper Thebaid, among those to whom he was unknown… While he was considering these things, a voice came to him from above, 'Antony, where are you going and why?' But he no way disturbed, but as he had been accustomed to be called often thus, giving ear to it, answered, saying, 'Since the multitude permit me not to be still, I wish to go into the upper Thebaid on account of the many hindrances that come upon me here, and especially because they demand of me things beyond my power.' But the voice said unto him, 'Even though you should go into the Thebaid, or even though, as you have in mind, you should go down to the Bucolia, you will have to endure more, aye, double the amount of toil. But if you wish really to be in quiet, depart now into the inner desert.' And when Antony said, 'Who will show me the way for I know it not?' immediately the voice pointed out to him Saracens about to go that way. So Antony approached, and drew near them, and asked that he might go with them into the desert. And they, as though they had been commanded by Providence, received him willingly. And having journeyed with them three days and three nights, he came to a very lofty mountain, and at the foot of the mountain ran a clear spring, whose waters were sweet and very cold; outside there was a plain and a few uncared-for palm trees.

"Antony then, as it were, moved by God, loved the place, for this was the spot which he who had spoken with him by the banks of the river had pointed out… [H]e went over the land round the mountain, and having found a small plot of suitable ground, tilled it; and having a plentiful supply of water for watering, he sowed. This doing year by year, he got his bread from thence, rejoicing that thus he would be troublesome to no one, and because he kept himself from being a burden to anybody. But after this…he cultivated a few pot-herbs, that he who came to him might have some slight solace after the labour of that hard journey."

—Athanasius, Life of Antony

"The desert…where the strong, independent spirits withdraw and become lonely—oh, how different it looks from the way educated people imagine a desert!—for in some cases they themselves are this desert, these educated people. And it is certain that no actor of the spirit could possibly endure life in it—for them it is not nearly romantic or Syrian enough, not nearly enough of a stage desert! To be sure, there is no lack of camels in it; but that is where the similarity ends. A voluntary obscurity perhaps; an avoidance of oneself; a dislike of noise, honor, newspapers, influence; a modest job, an everyday job, something that conceals rather than exposes one; an occasional association with harmless, cheerful beasts and birds whose sight is refreshing; mountains for company…—that is what ‘desert’ means here: oh, it is lonely enough, believe me!"

—Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

"[Curiositas] reaches the extreme of its destructive and eradicating power when it builds itself a world according to its own image and likeness: when it surrounds itself with the restlessness of a perpetual moving picture of meaningless shows, and with the literally deafening noise of impressions and sensations breathlessly rushing past the windows of the senses. Behind the flimsy pomp of its façade dwells absolute nothingness; it is a world of, at most, ephemeral creations, which often within less than a quarter hour become stale and discarded, like a newspaper or magazine swiftly scanned or merely perused; a world which, to the piercing eye of the healthy mind untouched by its contagion, appears like the amusement quarter of a big city in the hard brightness of a winter morning: desperately bare, disconsolate, and ghostly.

"The destructiveness of this disorder which originates from, and grows upon, obsessive addiction, lies in the fact that it stifles man's primitive power of perceiving reality; that it makes man incapable not only of coming to himself but also of reaching reality and truth.

"If such an illusory world threatens to overgrow and smother the world of real things, then to restrain the natural wish to see takes on the character of a measure of self-protection and self-defense. Studiositas, in this frame of reference, primarily signifies that man should oppose this virtually inescapable seduction with all the force of selfless self-preservation; that he should hermetically close the inner room of his being against the intrusively boisterous pseudo-reality of empty shows and sounds. It is in such an asceticism of cognition alone that he may preserve or regain that which actually constitutes man's vital existence: the perception of the reality of God and His creation, and the possibility of shaping himself and the world according to this truth, which reveals itself only in silence."

—Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues