truth and fiction

Writing is a technology. It's such an ancient one that it's easy to forget this, but of course there are not just individuals but whole societies on Earth today that are illiterate or preliterate ("oral cultures"), and of course there was a time before the first writing had been invented by anyone. The earliest writing seems to have been used, as far as is known, purely for record-keeping. The idea of writing as an art-form came much later, probably when poems came to be recorded for posterity.

In his book The Beginnings of Western Science, David Lindberg makes this fascinating observation:

We must ask how the preliterate patterns of belief that we have been examining yielded to, or were supplemented by, a new conception of knowledge and truth (represented most clearly in the principles of Aristotelian logic and the philosophical tradition it spawned). The decisive development seems to have been the invention of writing. The development of fully syllabic systems about 1500 BC (that is, systems in which all nonsyllabic signs were discarded) made it possible and, indeed, reasonably easy for people to write down everything they could say. And finally fully alphabetic writing, which has a sign for each sound, made its appearance in Greece about 800 BC and became widely disseminated in Greek culture in the sixth and fifth centuries.

Writing replaced memory as the principal repository of knowledge. This had the revolutionary effect of opening knowledge claims to the possibility of inspection, comparison, and criticism. Such comparison encourages skepticism and, in antiquity, helped to create the distinction between truth, on the one hand, and myth or legend, on the other; that distinction, in turn, called for the formulation of criteria by which truthfulness could be ascertained; and out of the effort to formulate suitable criteria emerged rules of reasoning, which offered a foundation for serious philosophical activity.

He's saying that the invention of writing was the key event that launched the system of knowledge that we now call science.

But what about writing as an art? Is it not also concerned, in some way, with "truth"? How does it relate?

Before writing as art there must have been speech as art: ritual, poetry, rhetoric. We write things down that we want to remember, or to communicate to someone else to whom we can't speak--such as to a posterity beyond our own time.

Over against Lindberg's assertion of the importance of writing as a step on the road to science--objective natural knowledge, consider this extract (compressed) from Campbell's Creative Mythology:

Bertrand Russell has summarized in one sentence his own idea of the aim of symbolization: "The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts." A more usual business of language, however, has been to motivate action. To assert or deny "fact" is about the last thing language has ever been used for. "Fiction," rather, would have been the honest term for this master of clarity to have used--for, as Nietzsche already knew, "whatever can be thought, cannot but be a fiction." And "Logic rests on presuppositions to which nothing in the actual world corresponds."

From that point of view, then, there is nothing but fiction: all of our "science" is really just a branch of fictional art.

Back in 1981, when I was struggling with the issues of my spiritual beliefs and also with my vocation as an artist, I wanted to write an essay on this topic. I sat down at the drawing-table that served as my main writing-desk and wrote the title: "Truth and Fiction". Under this I wrote a couple of sentences, but realized that I had no idea what I really knew or thought about this whole topic. I wanted to justify to myself the whole vocation of a fiction-maker, somebody who sits down and deliberately writes "false" things. I had no idea how to do so, and it caused me a lot of difficulty and pain.

I no longer feel such agitation about this topic, but I don't feel altogether comfortable with it either. I think Lindberg is right, and I also think Campbell is right.

The image that comes to mind now is one that comes to mind in many situations for me: of a documentary I saw once about the making of samurai swords. I've probably mentioned it before, but here goes again: the sword-makers would heat the steel, hammer it out, double it over, and temper it by plunging it in a water bath. Then they would heat it again, hammer it out, and anneal it by letting it air-cool slowly. Tempering makes steel hard; annealing makes it flexible. By repeating this alternating process, tempering and annealing the steel, the Japanese sword-makers created a steel composed of thousands of layers of alternately hard and flexible metal. In this way the samurai sword became that seemingly impossible combination: a weapon that was both hard and flexible.

Truth, in the sense of something that corresponds with fact, and fiction, in the sense of something that deviates from fact, somehow depend on each other. I remember watching an episode of Kung Fu starring David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, of which I was a passionate fan at age 14, in which some brutish American says something to Caine, and tells him, "That's the truth!" Caine, with his trained Chinese calm, responds, "Those are facts--they're not the truth."

It was the first time I'd been exposed to that distinction, and it has resonated within me ever since. Fiction seems to acknowledge and affirm the fantastic, projected, constructed aspect of experience, the dreamlikeness of it. "Truth" or fact seems to affirm the hard-edged, given quality of experience--the inescapable that-ness of it. They exist only in relation to each other, and the more you emphasize either one, the closer is the moment that it will transform into its opposite, just as in the ancient teaching of yin and yang.

what's your story?

This morning: rain. I've just opened the office blinds (the hexagonal acetate rod that controls the blinds still swings from the action). Across the wet greenery of the garden I see activity in the neighbors' window: the woman packing or unpacking something. There is a faint, slow percussion of raindrops hitting wood and plastic. Two floors up from me Kimmie is still getting ready for work.

Where are my thoughts these days. Well, on other than a purely personal front, I'm noticing how ideas are all around us. An idea, once formed, seems to remain part of the permanent stock of human culture, at least as long as there are records of the past. Whether a particular idea is regarded as true seems to be determined by the temper of the times. I was just reading, for instance, about how the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa in the 7th century BC, and noted how the sun, in the course of their journey, came to rise and set in the north instead of the south--early evidence for the sphericity of the Earth, a theory which was to be developed by Greek philosophers soon after. When I was a child I was taught that it was Christopher Columbus who "proved" that the Earth was round in 1492, while in fact this had been proved at least 1,800 years earlier. "Spherical Earth" and "flat Earth" are two ideas, and they're no doubt held by different people to this day.

But the spherical Earth seems to be a matter of fact. What about other, more value-charged ideas? Those are perhaps the more interesting. Does God exist? What is the nature of consciousness? Why is there a universe? It seems the mere posing of such questions sparks ideas--suggestions, possibilities, guesses. Each of us chooses certain ones and decides to believe in these--to hold them as true.

A book I'm reading right now, by Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth, contains an interesting, and for me, new, way of defining myth: "the stories we believe". When I read this I found it simple yet powerful and provocative. I hadn't thought about it in just that way before. It contains two elements: A myth is a story, and more particularly, a story we believe.

Think about it. What stories do you believe?

We have our own stories: the story of our life. The stories of particular events within it. We have stories that we believe about other people in our lives--stories they may or may not agree with.

Those might be called "personal myths". Then there are wider, more generally accepted stories. Some of these are termed scientific theories, such as the theory of evolution: the story of how humanity came to be from animal precursors. If you believe that story, then it's your myth--part of your mythology. We have the story of how the universe originated with the Big Bang and developed through impersonal forces into the vast, complex, and life-supporting thing it is today. If you believe that story, then it is part of your mythology.

Most of what we believe is on the basis of authority: we believe what we're told to believe. I've never measured the cosmic background radiation; experts tell me that the universe is expanding and must have originated in a Big Bang, so I believe it. People tell me there's a country called Venezuela; I've never been there, but I believe that.

Much depends, then, on whom we regard as authorities. Do I regard The Bible as an authority? If so, why do I? It will because someone else told me to. That person is an authority.

Of course, we can accept or reject an authority. I'm thinking that often the changing of an authority in our lives, switching from rejecting to accepting, or accepting to rejecting, is an epochal event: life-changing, empowering. Our beliefs then change, and with them our mythology.

So I'm asking myself: what stories do I believe? And maybe even more importantly: why do I believe them? I think somewhere around here one gets close to the beating heart of one's character.

examining life

Yesterday another book arrived in the mail--another Christmas experience for me, since it's one of the greatest treats I have in my life. This one was The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture by Francesca Rochberg. I'm trying to think where I discovered this book. It was while I was looking up another book on cuneiform astronomical texts on Amazon.com. But why was I looking up that book? Where did I find the reference? It's bothering me; I can't remember.

Ah: I have it. I just turned around to my desk and saw the November 2006 issue of Scientific American there (under a library copy of In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq by Nir Rosen). One of the articles--one that convinced me to buy this particular issue of SciAm--is "The Origin of the Greek Constellations" by Bradley E. Schaeffer. It seems the Greek constellations were mainly taken on from the earlier Babylonian (and more generally, Mesopotamian) system, with a few new additions of their own. (As I recall, Giorgio de Santillana was able to show that the constellations--and astronomical lore in general--are much, much older than history.)

At the end of the article, under the heading "More to Explore", are three references, one of which, Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia by H. Hunger and D. Pingree, I decided to look up on Amazon.com. The book looked too technical (and expensive!) for me, but another book listed there ("Buy this book with...") was the Rochberg book. I found it on Google Book Search, and experienced that gut feeling that told me I wanted to read this book. I looked for a used copy on Abebooks.com, and found a new one there at a decent price.

That's how I laid my hands on a copy of The Heavenly Writing. I wanted to say something about this restless, almost compulsive search for knowledge that I have. At times I have a feeling of futility, since I'm well aware I can read only so many books in my life, and that I will never know everything. Nonetheless, it's important to gain knowledge--true knowledge, accurate knowledge. Without that, one's actions are misguided and often lead to disaster.

This to me is an important theme in Sister Carrie, which I've read now as far as page 225 or so--around halfway. The painful sexual and domestic machinations are brought on, in good part, by ignorance. For one thing, characters conceal things from each other in order to achieve their ends, only to have these things emerge in painful and disastrous ways. (As an astrologer, I see a heavy influence of the planet Neptune in Sister Carrie--deception, delusion, and their consequences.)

But deeper than that is the ignorance the characters have of themselves--their true natures, their true wishes and drives. They don't understand themselves, have never thought to try to understand themselves, and their decisions and actions have a blind, blundering quality as they grope for happiness in whatever direction seems at the moment to be offering it. They are like ballistic missiles with missing or misprogrammed guidance systems. They fly fast and hot, and will deliver a ferociously explosive payload--but where? To switch to a more familiar metaphor: the characters are all loose cannons on deck.

Socrates is reputed to have said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." These people lead unexamined lives. I don't know whether they're exactly not worth living, but there is a sense of blundering animals caught dumbly in some trap or exhibition: they're goaded and driven here and there, reacting in pain and fear and rage, lashing out blindly, trying to reduce the painful stimuli.

Our decisions are always based on our level of knowledge about ourselves and our world. They cannot be any better than that knowledge. Socrates's dictum was in a way a corollary of the famous motto of the oracle at Delphi: "Know thyself." It was the oracle of Apollo, the god of knowledge, and no doubt that advice is still well worth taking. If you want to know thyself, you'd better get examining your life.

If you need a cautionary tale about the train-wrecks that attend the unexamined life, stick your nose in Sister Carrie.

a question for an artist

Temperatures have dropped even lower here--around −7° C--but it is sunny and brilliant. I trudged out on errands--get cash, buy a ham hock, drop book and DVD at the library, and down Lonsdale to the liquor store for scotch and wine. When I pay attention, I'm quite sure-footed and not given to falling. I trod carefully over the patches of smooth, hard-tramped ice, mainly at intersections.

Still embroiled in my copywriting assignment, I am still drifting with The Mission. Not entirely: I'm still keying notes first thing in the morning (after switching on the heat throughout the house and making the coffee), from Uriel's Machine, which I bought at this time last year.

"Uriel's machine" is their name for a device the authors theorize was specified in the "Book of the Heavenly Luminaries" portion of the Book of Enoch--a simple observatory that can be set up at any latitude to create an accurate calendar for that latitude. (Uriel was the angel who enlightened Enoch about the heavens.) The depth of the astronomical understanding underlying it, coupled with the great simplicity of its design (a matter of setting vertical sticks in holes along an arc), point to the sophisticated engineering intelligence behind it.

Lomas and Knight, the authors, believe that devices like "Uriel's machine" were used at the henge-type megalithic monuments of the British Isles--of which there are remains for more than 40,000. There is strong evidence that the so-called Grooved Ware People, a seemingly quite advanced culture that lived in Western Europe about 5,000 years ago, used observatories and may even have built scientific stations--which is what the complex at Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands appears to be (dated to 3215 BC), with thoughtfully made uniform apartments for occupants who apparently neither farmed nor hunted, but ate meat that had been specially transported to the site.

All of this is of keen interest to me. Enoch was of special interest and importance to the Essenes, who feature prominently in my story. I chew through the material, comparing it to what I already know, slowly working toward my own theory of what happened.

In all, I sense that a great deal of knowledge has been lost over the millennia. And while we're smug about our scientific progress, we should remember that the kinds of knowledge we seek--the very questions we ask--would have been considered uninteresting to people in the ancient world.

This is illustrated with a great example by the Frankforts, quoted by David C. Lindberg in The Beginnings of Western Science. If I keeled over now at my keyboard, my body would be taken to a morgue and autopsied to find the cause of death. The doctor would discover evidence of, say, a massive heart attack, and write this on the death certificate. Problem solved.

An ancient person looking at the situation would be very dissatisfied. The question asked by the modern doctor is not interesting to him. The modern scientist is looking for an answer to this: "To what general class of phenomena does this particular case belong?" When he finds that, he regards his job as done.

The ancient person asks a different question: "Why did this man die in this way at this time?"

It's a very different question. The ancient person is interested in the meaning of an event--its significance. Science has very little to say about this. It's a question for an artist. Or perhaps for a shaman. But it deserves to be answered, don't you think?

why am I doing this, again?

I wanted to get back to talking about my novel--the thing that this blog is supposed to be about. What do I want to say about it? In these dark times, when I myself question what the heck I'm doing, and why, it might be good to review those questions. Why am I doing this? What is the value?

One avenue of inquiry is: What makes my project different? The log-line for The Mission--the one-sentence description of the story that appears at the top-right corner of the blog's main page--generates a certain frisson of excitement because it suggests that my story is about the (true, secret, unexpected) origin of Christianity. Which it is. But my focus is not on Christianity, particularly, as such. I am not a Christian, nor have I ever been one, and nor will I ever become one. Christianity, to me, is an important world religion, and one of the main tributaries of our modern Western culture--the culture I was raised in. But its claim on exclusive truth is no greater than that of any other off-the-shelf spiritual system.

The reason I became excited about doing this story was that Christianity, I believe, is connected closely with the symbolism of the precession of the equinoxes--the almost imperceptible shifting of the Earth's axis in time which causes the north pole to describe a wide circle in the sky every 25,920 years. It is this gradual shift that causes the zodiac--the band of stars through which the sun and planets appear to travel in their orbits--to creep backwards, so that, little by little, the sun, on the spring equinox, comes to rise in a different zodiacal constellation. The sun rises, each year on March 21, in each constellation for 25,920 ÷ 12 = 2,160 years, on average. Each of these periods of 2,160 years, when the sun rises in one zodiacal constellation, is known as an astrological age. Right now the sun rises each March 21 in the constellation of Pisces, which means that we live in the Age of Pisces.

But we're near the end of the Age of Pisces. Soon (and exactly when depends on how you draw your map of the constellations) we will enter the Age of Aquarius. So the Age of Pisces began something just over 2,000 years ago--close to the time that Christianity had its origin. Jung, in his book Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, makes a detailed case that the unfolding of Christianity over the past 2,000 years, and especially of the attitude of Western people to the figure of Christ himself, correlates closely with the movement of the vernal equinox (which is technically a geometrical point in the sky--the point of intersection of the equator and the ecliptic) through the sign of the fishes. (The fish, of course, is a key symbol of Christianity.) Jung believed that the figure of Christ evolved in tandem with his dark twin, the Antichrist or Satan, who became the repository of the evil that could not form any part of Christ's nature. Christian eschatology refers to a final confrontation between the two at the end of time.

I'm fascinated by Jung's interpretation, and it is an important inspiration for my work. Jung was a Christian, but he wasn't writing as one. He was writing as a psychologist and as a philosopher, an interpreter of the symbols that have appeared in our civilization. He defined symbol as a representation of something that cannot be completely known. It expresses something that is too vast, too vague, or too paradoxical to be presented directly to consciousness. Symbol, of course, is the language of dream and of myth.

So I'm interested in the Age of Pisces, and its key signifier in the world, Christianity. They are symbolic of things deeper and beyond themselves. This emphasis makes my work much different from most historical fiction, especially that dealing with Christ and his period. I'm thinking of things like The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson or Christ the Lord by Anne Rice, which essentially accept the biblical narrative(s) at face value and retell them, or things like Testament by Nino Ricci, which is a euhemerist retelling of the Christian myth. The first category is essentially pious. The second is an attempt to account for the mythologization of historical events by showing how extraordinary but nonetheless natural people give rise to legends about themselves.

Mine is in neither of those classes of work. I'm not a pious Christian (or any other kind), and I don't believe we have Christian mythology, and the Christian religion, because a few extraordinary people did some unusual things 2,000 years ago. No: other, deeper things are at work.

But I've written enough for today.

hermaphrodite dream

A night of dreams. Here is one I remember from shortly before I woke at around 4:45:

I'm with Kimmie. We're at an exhibition or a theme park. The particular locale seems to be a kind of football or soccer field. It has historical and maybe archaeological exhibits on it, like ruined portions of buildings. I see that off to one side of the field are the great stones of Stonehenge. I'm surprised to see these here, since we’re in Israel; why would Israel have the stones of Stonehenge? It might be incongruous, but I feel awe. Don't others feel how special they are?

K and I go into an annex at the side of the field, a kind of trailer for museum exhibits (more like a ferry-terminal waiting area). A few tourists are trailing out, having seen the last screening of the film they show here. It seems we're just in time to catch the next showing--something to do with the overall exhibit: the history of the area or country.

K and I take seats in a row that is getting full, hard-plastic bucket-type seats on fixed racks, as at an airport or bus depot. A group or family next to us is taking seats. One woman, a plain-looking woman in glasses and a gray sweatsuit, but energetic and lively, is dropping off her stuff, trying to get her friends and family to save her a seat while she goes to do something. For some reason she has to fetch something from or put something in a big cloth duffel-bag that her female friend has in front of her on the floor. I watch while the friend opens the bag wide, and the woman tugs down her sweats a little to produce her large, semi-erect penis with black pubic hair. She flexes her legs to point her penis into the bag, as though the bag provides cover so that only--or almost only--her friend can see her flash it. Her attitude is saucy and mischievous. Is it a joke? Is she relieving herself somehow? She covers it up and whisks away.

Now K and I arrive at the couple of little rows of seats facing the TV screen where the museum film is about to start. There are just a few tourists and bored kids here. We take our seats and the film starts: maybe previews featuring old black-and-white documentary footage.

I typed up this dream during my morning coffee session, and made some interpretive notes. The image of a museum or theme park made me think of my recent reflections on theme, in both my work and my life. Theme = meaning. So a park (it was set up on a playing field, actually) to do with the meaning of the past. My work is historical fiction, and the dead hand of the past reaches through my life as well, as through everyone's.

The park is in Israel, and my story is about the ancient monarchy of Israel: the "Holy Land". I'm treating it as a place of origin for some of the most important cultural and mythological strands in our world today.

The sight of the monuments of Stonehenge was awesome (I in fact visited Stonehenge in 1978) in the dream. They were not in their circular formation, but standing in a row discreetly at the side of the field, near bushes and trees; and they were not being paid particular attention by the rest of the visitors. I'm reading about henges (ancient circular ditches that were used for astronomical purposes) in Uriel's Machine by Lomas and Knight; there are 40,000 megalithic sites in Britain--more than there are modern settlements. The megalithic structures date back to 4000 BC and earlier. The authors are making an argument that the megalithic monuments were the products of a culture that practiced relatively advanced astronomy, and that these astronomers were the ones referred to in the Book of Enoch, a core spiritual text of a Jewish tradition that never made it into the Bible. In my dream the stones have been brought to Israel; the connection has been made, but is not being paid attention to.

As for the hermaphrodite in the annex, this was a powerful and uncanny moment in the dream. The duffel-bag made me think of the magic wallet of Perseus, in which he put the severed head of Medusa to hide it after he cut it off. The bag, like his other accoutrements, was owned by Hades, and kept by the three Stygian Nymphs--the women who shared a single eye and a single tooth, passing these between themselves. I had a unique point of view into the bag, and saw a strange sight. I was witness to a secret, a mystery.

Here's what Cirlot, in his Dictionary of Symbols, says about the hermaphrodite (compressed):

The hermaphrodite is a consequence of applying the symbolism of the number two to the human being, creating a personality which is integrated despite its duality. The hermaphrodite is, above all, a god of procreation, closely linked, and ultimately identified, with the Gemini archetype. Psychologically hermaphroditism represents a formula of "totality", of the "integration of opposites". In other words, in expresses in sexual terms the idea that all pairs of opposites are integrated into Oneness. In addition, it is a symbol of an intellectual activity not in itself connected with the problem of the sexes. Blavatsky says that all peoples regarded their first god as androgynous, because Primitive humanity knew that he had sprung from "the mind", as is shown by traditions such as that of Minerva springing from the head of Jupiter. In alchemy, the Hermaphrodite plays an important role as Mercury; he is depicted as a two-headed figure, often accompanied by the word Rebis (double thing).

If the hermaphrodite is Mercury, the transformative agency of alchemy, then the bag is the alchemical vas, the vessel in which the transformation takes place.

Things are changing within me. I already know this. But I don't know from what, or to what.

mirror of the past

Steady rain falls through colder air.

Morning notes: A History of Technology and Alexander the Great. From the former I'm now learning about early metallurgy. The specific subheadings this morning were "Beginnings of Metal-Working" and "Gold", both by R. J. Forbes, professor of pure and applied sciences in antiquity at the University of Amsterdam. From the latter I'm now learning about the culture and administration of the Persian empire that Alexander, its soon-to-be conqueror, is taking on. The Persians, tolerant of and open-minded about the cultures they absorbed into their empire, freely intermarried with their new subjects and appointed them to high administrative positions. From their new subjects they absorbed ideas about religion, statecraft, and even how to structure their own royal court.

Alexander, a man in his 20s, in his turn found it advantageous to adopt the methods of the Persians, installing many of his vanquished enemies as satraps and administrators over the territories he was putting under his control. This ecumenical approach was to become the hallmark and defining characteristic of the succeeding Hellenistic age, when Greek-educated Macedonian kings would rule over Oriental domains. It was the first great melting-pot of East and West, and for that reason I see it as a mirror of our own global village.

The imposition of Greek-style political and social systems on nations that had never known these, as far east as Afghanistan, triggered a kind of answering wave from the East, the vital power of Asian religion and mysticism, which washed over the Western societies of Greece and Rome before they realized what had hit them. Gradually, then increasingly, citizens of these seemingly supreme conquering civilizations became converts to religions of the East, which promised direct personal experience of contact with the divine, the absolute--a far cry from the dry, habitual relics that were the state cults of the West. From the East came the idea of the immortal soul and its status, and Western women and men--mainly in that order--discovered a thirst for salvation.

The Western cults had little to say to seekers of salvation; the Eastern had plenty to say. The cult that became known as Christianity was one of these, and for a number of reasons it would triumph in the spiritual marketplace that was Rome and, later, Europe.

Little by little, piece by piece, I put the puzzle together in my mind. The ancient world is a mirror of our own. My very fascination with it is the surest evidence that this is so. I see myself reflected back there, and therefore I see us all.