From the light of a different sun

[PeteMork]

Wow! You never cease to amaze me, Sauvin. Dark, beautiful and insightful. And, just as important, a new perspective.

...It brought machines made from iron that roared like mountain lions and built houses of war by pouring stone into wood...

!!!

[dongregg]

Thanks, sauvin.

[sauvin]

What happened? Where am I?

Who am I?

What am I?

There’s nothing behind me. I mean, there’s literally nothing, just a blackness like nothing I can remember ever seeing. All I can see is a dirt floor, some stone walls, a woman covered in – blood? - and brandishing a sword glowing red, and daylight through a door with another woman looking in through it.

I feel like I have to get to that woman in the door. If I can do that, everything will be OK. It doesn’t look like the woman with the sword wants to let me do that.

I’m here, but I’m not. When I look down, I can see my body, but I can also see the floor right through my body. But it’s not my body. At least, I don’t think so. I think I was old. Very, very old. Not like I am now, in the body of a young girl. I remember hurting a lot, vaguely. I think I remember not being able to breathe, and I might have been in a fire.

Am I dead?

Am I a ghost?

How can I be dead and still have so many questions?

Is the woman with the sword going to ask questions? If she does, what should I say? Will she laugh when I say I can’t even remember my own name or that I might have been a very, very old man just a little while ago? Will she call me a liar when I say I can’t remember ever having seen the sun with my own two eyes?

I don’t think I can stand here very long. I’d love to, really. This is a really good body; nothing hurts. If I could just stay right here, my only complaint would be that I’m cold. Not freezing cold, just cold enough to notice. I can’t remember ever being cold before, either.

Well, and I think I used to be a lot stronger than I am now, and a lot faster. It feels like I can barely move.

Well, and it’s dark in here. When was the last time I had problems seeing in the dark? I don’t think I ever did.

Let’s say it’s true, that I’m dead, that I’m moving on. That makes me something I can’t remember ever believing in: a ghost. A spirit. A wraith or shade or spectre or phantom.

A shadow.

So, if the woman with the sword tries to cut my head off, wouldn’t that sword just pass through me? But if that’s so, then what is all that blood on her body?

Why am I worried more about my neck than my belly? One is as good as another, isn’t it? Dead is dead!

Oh, this is confusing! If I’m dead, is there such a thing as an after-death death?

I think I’ve faced people with swords before. Well, I feel like I have, anyway. Looking at her throat. Looking at that place in her leg just next to her groin, one good slash and she’ll on the ground bleeding to death in about three breaths flat. One good poke in the eye, a kick in that place just under the ribs, a solid punch to the side of the head just behind the eye.

Thing of it is, she doesn’t look very scared. She’s not moving towards me, but she’s not backing away, either. She’s just standing there, waiting.

She looks like she knows me. Knows what I am. If so, then she’s sure to know a lot more about me than I can remember for myself.

So, if we’re going to fight, how do I fight back? She has that sword, and all I have are my hands and feet… and why am I thinking my fingernails are too short or that my teeth aren’t big enough? She’s a woman. I think. And it looks like I’m a girl. If I’m not like what I feel like I used to be, then she’s bigger than I am, and heavier, and stronger. Maybe even faster.

Who is the woman in the doorway? It’s dark in here, but it’s light out there. I can’t see her very clearly, but she looks like she wants me to go through that door and be with her. She’s waiting, too, and she’s wearing clothes and looks warm and friendly and solid. And it’s strange, that light, it’s daylight, I think, and I want to go and be in it even though something inside me is screaming not to go anywhere near it. Something about that woman makes me feel like if I could just get to her, I’ll never have any more questions or be afraid again.

With some fairly obvious exceptions, this is a primeval setting. Before we had language, we had caves instead of buildings made of stone, and we had stone buildings long before anybody figured out how to work with metals. Maybe we had clothing before we had language, but if so, it’d have likely been animal pelts, and we’d probably have worn them to insulate ourselves from wind, sun and cold without much concern for modesty, and what little I can see of what the girl in the doorway is wearing could have been made as early as Roman times.

I think images of dungeons and folks with swords cling to our nightmares more than the possibility of being cornered in a cave with a large cat because we can’t remember those days, whereas we have books and oral traditions to remind us that they weren’t called the “Dark Ages” because the sun and moon skipped that millennium.

Why did they have to be women, and why aren’t two of them wearing anything?

Maybe this is just an old fart not adjusting easily to the modern day: when I was growing up, girls were smaller than boys, and slower, and weaker. Pit a nine year old girl armed with nothing but a smile against a thirty year old man sporting a sword and wearing a helmet, armour and greaves, and what you’ve got, in all likelihood, is a very one-sided fight, and a very short one. The religion into which I was born has everybody facing an all-powerful, all-knowing deity on a judgment day, and we, too, won’t be able to bring anything to muster more dangerous than a smile – we’ll be just like the barely visible girl in this image.

And this is an old fart who’s having no trouble adjusting to the modern day: a woman isn’t a girl. The woman with the sword might not be Xena (or Michelle Yeoh), but if she’s got any kind of training and experience, that same thirty year old man wearing nothing but a beard would be almost as vulnerable as that very same nine year old girl. My lifetime has actually been a really cool time to live in because I got to watch girls and women come to understand that they have strength and intelligence and opinions worth listening to. They can be anything they want to be – they can DO anything they want to do, and it’s made them boatloads more interesting to live with than the wallflowers I went to grade school with. The woman with the sword in this image has a job to do and isn’t made any less capable of doing it by her nudity: she’s not vulnerable, she’s just unencumbered.

So, who’s the woman in the door?

She might be Mom. For most folk, Mom is the one person in this whole wide world who’ll love you no matter where you might have been or what you might have done. She’s always going to be there with a hot bowl of chicken noodle soup on a cold winter night and a comforting word or three when you’ve just lost your wife, your job, your car and your apartment. Maybe you’re her son, and maybe you’re her daughter, and maybe she isn’t really your mother because you were adopted or because your real mother died and that woman is actually just your aunt (but long ago forgot that little factoid).

A real mother is God in the eyes of her child.

Even if she’s not Mom, though, she’s still somebody outside the darkness, outside the cold, somebody standing in the daylight in the middle of green life and she’s wearing clothes. She’s the very picture of everything that’s right in this life. She doesn’t have any sword to swing at you, but she just might chuck you a huge hot steaming bowl of beef stew if she can get you to join her for dinner.

I don’t personally believe anymore in the kind of Judgment Day I was raised to believe in, but that’s not to say I don’t believe in some kind of deity. We left our Easter Bunnies and our Tooth Fairies and our Santa Clauses behind a very long time ago, probably about the same time we lost faith in ghosts, vampires and other things that go (bump) in the night, but some of the more advanced thinkers of our time suggest that our bunnies and our bloodsuckers are metaphors for how we see ourselves and each other, especially when the lights go out.

I’m kinda stuck with welcoming oblivion when it comes, but until it does, there’s still some part of the forebrain that likes to beat up the hindbrain whenever I dream, and mine can be… um… merciless. The forebrain understands very well that the things we build, we pass on to our future generations just as much as the traditional sins that are visited on our sons (and daughters), and their children, and ….

This is what life is often like, at least for me: before you can get to whatever is good, you have to get through a gauntlet that is neither necessarily evil nor necessarily good. Somehow, threatening the woman with the sword “if you swing that thing at me, lady, I’m gonna belly-bop you clean into next week!” just isn’t going to get anybody closer to the daylight, and it altogether too often seems that a massive belly is the only natural weapon I can bring to bear. Like the barely visible girl, I have no fangs, claws, superhuman strength or speed – and flight would be impossible even if I had wings.

Heck, I don’t even have any SUBSTANCE!

Since violence probably isn’t going to get anybody anywhere, at least not in this image, then diplomacy is clearly needed. Trouble is, how do we know how to talk to the woman with the sword when we can’t imagine what she wants?

[dongregg]

Both the picture and the words are mysterious, engaging, evocative.

[sauvin]

Both the picture and the words are mysterious, engaging, evocative.

"Mysterious"?

[dongregg]

Mysterious. What dark place is she in? What's in the light? Although he or she feels incorporeal, the blood and the sword suggests a corporeal threat. Is he or she dead? Dreaming? Evocative. The darkness evokes the unknown, as in things that go bump in the night; but the light evokes thoughts or feelings of safety, if only he or she is not prevented by the woman. Engaging. The viewer/reader can't help but want to know more.

Is there more? There doesn't have to be, of course.

[sauvin]

Ah, you want to know if the princess directed the man towards the door with the lady behind it, or the one with the tigre?

[dongregg]

Well put!

[sauvin]

I sometimes miss being seventeen, when I was invincible, omniscient and immortal. The world was a much simpler place, easier to figure out, and there was no question for which I didn't already have an answer or for which there was a book nearby to address it. Plus, life could be really pleasant when all the blood didn't exactly rush to the head above the collar bones several times a day. Maybe there's something to be said for being old enough that the blood rarely rushes anywhere (usually, it just kinda "lumbers" or "ambles"): life is generally quite a bit more peaceful now, but every answer I find anymore seems to spawn a dozen more questions.

The hardest pill I've ever had to swallow on an intellectual plane, I think, marked the end of my existence on that plane when I read GEB, where I learned that Kurt Goedel had proven that formal axiomatic systems can be either consistent or complete, but not both. Heisenberg's uncertainty, Tarski's undefinability and Turing's inability to know when, where or if it's going to stop left me with very limited faith in just about anything at a time when the humanities had lost their appeal. We know not, but very few of us know that we know not; more we think we know, more we're just blubbering idiots.

My wife used to say that she couldn't understand the cathexis to horror and science fiction because she was too "rational", seeming to believe that stories involving blaster guns and human-like critters with improbably outsized canines automatically excluded any possibility of a real story. It was pointless to try to argue that the blasters and the fangs were just props to help promote allegory. I told her that you can't get value from the story if you can't get past things that don't seem real on the surface. She wasn't stupid by any means, but her direct, literal way of thinking didn't allow for the kinds of approachable indirection that allegory affords.

Imagine my dismay, then, when I saw the movie Ex Machina again for the first time in a while and realised that I'd failed to see the statement the several times I'd watched the movie before: I didn't get past the Turing tests and the shiny impossibly dense brains and the wildly improbable hydraulics (given the current state of mechanical engineering). It isn't a movie about technological promise and it isn't a Frankenstein-like tale lost in a morass of moral contention. Nathan is just a raging misogynist who cares only about the sound of his own voice, and Ava seduces his friend and enlists his girlfriend (and her older sibling, how sick is this?) in her bid to run away from home.

The original image is of a nude young girl walking through what appears to be ruins towards the woman in the doorway in broad daylight. Google up "nude girl in the woods at night" and you may run across it, you'll almost certainly see thematically similar images. It reminded me of some pop psych babble in a teen slasher satire where the major character in training to become a Freddie or a Jason explains that moving through this kind of narrow space is symbolic of birth. When you emerge, you're reborn.

While I was playing with the image, turning the girl into a ghost, I added the warrior girl on a lark. Birth now became judgment on an unknown basis. Turn the lights WAY down, add a few spatters of blood and a sword that glows in the dark and it now becomes judgment likely with terminal consequence.

It doesn't have to be an after-death judgment. I believe anybody who can feel another person's pain can have exactly this kind of scene play out in his dreams. Something you said or didn't say, something you did or didn't do, somebody else got hurt somehow, and now the woman with the sword is going to "explain" a few things in a setting where escape is impossible but release and healing might be possible. There's just no way to know beforehand how this scene is going to play out because you just don't know what that woman is going to confront you with. It just depends on how fancy and complicated your moral compass is.

[dongregg]

Thanks for a really good post, and thanks for GEB. I've been toying with an idea that Gödel challenged Einstein with on one of their daily walks to work at Princeton. He said, imagine a galaxy in which the outer ring of stars is traveling at greater than the speed of light. Not impossible because matter can travel at that speed. It's just that it cannot be accelerated to that speed. Well, Gödel said, a point on the circumference would come around to the same place before it left. Gasp.

So I've been toying with the idea of dark matter being made up of such hyper-speed-of-light matter. You wouldn't see it, hence dark. But perhaps an inordinate increase in mass? A dark hole, but with a galaxy-size circumference. Voila--Einstein's cosmological constant.

How cool would it be if, instead of singularities, we could just reverse a few equations?

But dark energy? No clue.

I should just mention vampires so this post could possibly be related to LTROI.