Thursday, October 31, 2019

King Lycaon's Taste Challenge

"Apprivoiser l’absurdité du monde"

Mylène Farmer - Dessine-moi un mouton
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"Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?"

Edgar Allan Poe - Sonnet -- to Science

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"A quarter of a million years ago the utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely articulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity declined.
[...]
Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. [...] he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed he had done so - at least that some one had done so - he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith began fiction - pointing a way to achievement - and the august prophetic procession of tales.
[...]
And that first glimmering of speculation, that first story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most marvelous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun."

H.G. Wells - The World Set Free
(1914)
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"Well, what about this name: Edgar Allan Poe?"
Mr. Bigelow shook his head.
"Of course." Stendahl snorted delicately, a combination of dismay and contempt. "How could I expect you to know blessed Mr. Poe? He died a long while ago, before Lincoln. All of his books were burned in the Great Fire. That's thirty years ago - 1975."
"Ah," said Mr. Bigelow wisely. "One of those!"
"Yes, one of those, Bigelow. He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce and all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror and, for that matter, tales of the future were burned. Heartlessly. They passed a law. Oh, it started very small. In 1950 and '60 it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves."

[...]
"Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr.Garrett."

Ray Bradbury - Usher II - The Martian Chronicles
(1950)

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[???]
Richard Dawkins - Unweaving the Rainbow
(I haven't actually read it yet, though I probably should)
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"Unhappy is the land that has no heroes."
"Incorrect. Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat."

Bertolt Brecht - Life of Galileo

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Sometimes the world is demonstrably weird. Take the process of myzocytosis, in which one single-celled organism pokes a hole in another cell and sucks out its juicy innards. Top that, Max Schreck. What's weirder, most of these little suckers would fall under cyanobacteria, dinoflagellates and ciliates, which in popular parlance we tend to lump under "algae". Though I doubt many kids will go trick-or-treating tonight dressed in Vampirovibrio costumes, it bears noting the old bloodsucker myths hold true not only for bats, leeches, mosquitoes and a host of other macroscopic creepy-crawlies, but in realms the old storytellers could not even imagine. For all the boogeymen and contorted beasts they spawned, for all their flights of fancy and wisps of whimsy, never in their most lurid opium dreams did the fabulists of yore dream of whip-legged, vampiric pond scum.

All such microscopic dramas were unknowable until the Dutch and English started grinding down lenses and stacking them atop each other. Lenses and curiousity drained blood of its humour, dragged cantankerous old Apollo and Diana, Venus and Mars off their celestial chariots and in their place opened up literally whole new worlds. Science tore down the gods' Olympus and in its place lifted Olympus Mons, seven times its height. Science tore the naiad from her flood and replaced her with a million inhuman monsters so alien as to defy the imagination of mammoth-hunters and prematurely buried romanticists alike. We've slain the kraken, and dredged it up again... because for every wonder it dulls, our growing body of knowledge reveals an entire chorus line of mind-blowing, tangible phantasms. It's not the world at large that science makes more boring but ourselves by comparison, putting the pettiness of our forebears' imagination to shame.

And, it's one of the great calamities of the past couple of decades that imaginative fiction, after its late '90s flowering, has once again been ratcheted back to immediate human concerns, neatly folded with its possibilities sealed shut by the social contract. Whimsical adventures persist in our pop culture, more prevalent than ever but in a dumbed-down, sanitized, humanized fashion reminiscent of the cheesy "pulp" fictions of the early 20th century. Nothing can be permitted to permeate our public consciousness which is not made to prop up some shallow feeling of belonging to this or that social group. We love the old myths only inasmuch as they can be made safe and cozy for petty navel-gazing twits who view their own genitals as the utmost bounds of intellect and ambition. Failures of the imagination. Failures of intellect. We no longer read Jack London because he was too much of a socialist, and we can't be caught reading Ayn Rand because she wasn't enough of one. We can't read Andersen or the Grimms for fear of contracting nordic depression. We screw a childproof lid onto Baba Yaga's cauldron for fear gamboling feminists might trip into it along their victory march, and slap a chastity belt on Zeus for fear he'll put the Fates' eye out.

Yet it's never been a question of upholding old vs. new mythology. Follow one and you're bound to run into the other on the same continuum. No, the danger is rather of limiting ourselves to mere reiteration, of spinning our wheels in cozy reassuring heroics and morality plays. Mary Shelley wrote of a "modern" Prometheus two centuries ago, implicitly acknowledging her debt to old myths and building upon them with the science of her present, and ten generations of backlash later we find ourselves in dire need of post-post-modern titans to both acknowledge their debt to the Luddite mythologies of the industrial and information eras... and to construct upon them instead of de-constructing. Much of mythology may be ruled by the fear of the unknown, but let's not lose sight of one fact: our ancestors, soon after inscribing their maps with the phrase "hic sunt leones" would run out to seek said leones. True advancement does not destroy the past but incorporates it - in time, the fears and hopes we now consider human ideals and universals must in turn become minor subfields of literature, psychology and history, taking their place alongside the bisons of Lascaux. But it was not necessary to whitewash the bisons in order to surpass them.

Enough with the self-righteous attempts to sanitize and trivialize our modern folklore, enough with the damn glittering vampires and the relatable messianic superpowered do-gooders, enough with the glorified codependence. Away with heroes. Let there be villains! Let there be ghouls, gorging themselves on the culture of the past. Let there be vampires, filthy graveyard-spawned, blood-drenched abominations to drain the lowly humanity out of our primal fear of the night. Let there be werewolves, mangy, moon-mad, slavering half-beasts hounding the outskirts of our very concept of humanity, lone minds remaking themselves into transcendent forms. Let the ghosts of the past march among us unmolested, in all their tawdry, atavistic beauty, not to be worshipped but acknowledged, cherished in all their villainy, and grokked. Accept them as our elders' hand, not to guide but to steady our own so that we can, at long last, turn our microscopes and telescopes away from the squatting place and toward the horizon.

"and I shall make the heart of he who yet has ears for things unheard heavy with my happiness."
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra

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