Aaron Helton

#books #reading #review

Solemn heave the Atlantic waves between the gloomy nations,
Swelling, belching from its deeps red clouds & raging Fires.
Albion is sick America faints! enrag'd the Zenith grew.
As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbed heaven
Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood
And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o'er the Atlantic sea;
Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge
Of iron heated in the furnace: his terrible limbs were fire
With myriads of cloudy terrors banners dark & towers
Surrounded; heat but not light went thro' the murky atmosphere

—William Blake, America A Prophecy

“And as we stand looking all at once comes the wash of another unseen ship, like a great wheel, the vast spokes of the wheel whirling across the bay —” —Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Spoilers ahead.

On January 23, 1933, as it had many times before, one of Mexico's most active volcanoes, Popocatépetl, erupted. Nearby Ixtaccíhuatl, its twin volcanic mountain, lay long dormant. El Popo, as it is known, has figured in Mexican folklore since pre-Columbian times. The Nahuas formed several myths and legends about the peaks, which intertwine their fates through the lenses of love and loss, but also recount Popocatépetl's many eruptions. In most of these legends, Popocatépetl is an angry warrior grieving the death of his lover. He is the active volcano, the smoking mountain, and she is the dormant volcano or the sleeping woman in Nahuatl parlance.

Six years and nine months later, on the Day of the Dead (herein November 2) 1939, Malcolm Lowry situates us beneath these storied peaks, in the town of Quauhnahuac, or Cuernavaca. The story opens with a conversation between M. Jacques Laruelle and Dr. Arturo Díaz Vigil. They are discussing their mutual friend? acquaintance? the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, who met with a tragic end the year before, as well as his wife Yvonne and his half-brother Hugh. Like all who experience or witness such tragedies, they trade their many incredulities and speculate about what they could have done to prevent it, even as other events in the world threaten to sweep away the memory.

At its root, Under the Volcano is a story of dichotomies, of irreconcilable duality. The characters map to one and then the other at various times, but always roiling beneath the surface is the (self) destructive urge of mann (or ᛗ), something akin to Eliot's shadow, what falls “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act”. A cloud hangs over our characters: each at war within themselves, and each at war with one another. Lowry takes us through each devastating moment throughout the course of that day to watch a tragedy unfold along a trajectory that is as unavoidable as it is historically contingent. At every turn these warring dualities hold a silent mirror to the dissolving world order in ways that remain relevant and resonant. Especially today.

Structurally, the work is beholden to Ulysses, with its focus on a singular day. Lowry's day is compressed into 12 hours, with each chapter covering roughly one hour. This is also a nod to Homer, Virgil, and Milton. Though dense, the prose itself falls at times into a metrical rhythm, and so we can best understand this as an epic poem in blank verse, a fever dream of stream-of-consciousness through the lens of alcohol, especially mescal. Except for a few solid strands, it isn't important to grasp the inundation of language and layers and meanings that tug at one another with cross-purposes. There is a plot, but we already know the end. Lowry's goal seems less to impart a coherent order of events than to lead the reader through the psychological state of a man who will surely die. Read it once to let the words wash over you. A subsequent re-read may reveal more.

The central character, around whom the others orbit, is the Consul. Geoffrey Firmin, whose British Consulate post has been abolished via a breakdown in diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Mexico, is and has long been an alcoholic by the time we meet him on November 2, 1938. This is the last day he will live. The weight of his choices presses in on him, and later in the day he prophesies his own death. “Ah, ignoratio elenchi,” he says during one of his final tirades. “Can't you see there's a sort of determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.” By this point Lowry has revealed through confusion, unsteadiness, and hallucinations that Geoffrey suffers from delirium tremens (DTs), often brought about by his attempts to refrain from alcohol. He knows and admits, while simultaneously denying, that he has a problem. His alcoholism must at least in part be responsible for the dissolution of his marriage with Yvonne, who seems to have sought comfort with M. Laruelle. She, in fact, had left him the year before only to return on this day to seek reconciliation. Geoffrey is the first and most fundamental dichotomy: there is sober Geoffrey, now long dormant, and there is drunk Geoffrey, self-destructively active.

Mirrored outwards, Geoffrey's relationships each with Yvonne, Hugh, M. Laruelle, and even Dr. Vigil are their own dichotomies. Yvonne/Geoffrey are the lover/loser, Hugh/Geoffrey are the idealist/cynic, Laruelle/Geoffrey represent the temperate/intemperate, and Vigil/Geoffrey represent health/illness. They are of course false dichotomies because there is, in Geoffrey's view, only one outcome in each. The tyranny of determinism has extinguished all other paths so that the only choice remaining is self-annihilation. Yvonne came back, but she will leave again, because Geoffrey will drive her away. Hugh will if necessary die for his ideals while Geoffrey will die for his lack of them. And Geoffrey has cut himself off from the possibility of either temperance or health. The fault lines are already under strain, and the volcanic forces within him will permit no other end. He will erupt.

But there are other dichotomous mirrors here. The Consul, in his official capacity, had been a representative of the United Kingdom in Mexico. In 1938, when Lázaro Cárdenas ordered the expropriation of all oil companies in Mexico, the United Kingdom suspended diplomatic relations, leaving Geoffrey jobless if he were to remain in Mexico. Similarly, the situation in Europe was deteriorating. That same year the Second Spanish Republic launched an offensive from Ebro against the forces of the Spanish State under Franco, which it would eventually lose. Hitler's Anschluss and pressed claims on the Sudetenland also presaged the coming storm, much of which was in full force by the opening of the novel in 1939. The eruption in Europe had already begun.

Geoffrey Firmin's last hour takes place in a bar, the Farolito. This we have come to expect. He has fully capitulated to his addiction, and he knows with the foresight of self-fulfilling prophecy that Yvonne will not come back to him. It is still the Day of the Dead, a fact that had remained in the background for much of the novel. But as the Fiesta moves from graveside processions to the bars, the Farolito fills up with revelers, including several public officials who begin to suspect him of being a thief, a murderer, a Jew, a spy, and/or an American. His permanently drunken state leaves him ill equipped to fend off any such accusations. His drunken ramblings speculating on the fate of the Indigenous man who died outside El Amor de los Amores on the way to Tomalín either implicate him or the policeman.

Lowry presents, through prose that is dense, cerebral, and at times delirious, an acute documentary of the decline and fall of a man in the specific, and of ᛗ writ large. Painted against the backdrop of the looming Second World War, the parallels are stark. Historians have offered multiple causes for War. Lowry offers this singular, metaphorical collapse, which amalgamates most or all of those causes and spearpoints them into one man. It is as good a starting place as any. This is no Christ, but he will suffer for the sins of the world nonetheless, and rather than spare us the same misfortune, when he inevitably erupts, Geoffrey Firmin will take us down with him. In Geoffrey's death, we have our final dichotomy: Christ/Antichrist. Caught out in a lie, bearing papers that apparently belong to Hugh, one of the officials present in the bar, the Chief of Rostrums, admonishes him, “Wrider? You antichrista. Si, you antichrista prik.”

We can't be certain what happened to Yvonne and Hugh. Yvonne's final chapter appears to lead to her death as well. Hugh had intended to travel on to Spain to fight with the Republicans, but Lowry leaves us with no closure there either. It is likely, given the theme, that Geoffrey Firmin's death did, indeed, destroy those close to him, like an eruption of Popocatépetl. Laruelle and Vigil have escaped the damage. In the larger panoply, of course we know that some will escape and others will not. But even those who do escape must confront the ruin left behind.

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron

Elsewhere, long ago, I wrote about “whiteness” as a negation, a thing defined in terms of what it isn't. I'm not the only one to have made this point, of course, but what I was thinking about at the time was how such negations fit within the discourse around the paradox of tolerance. In short, it is right to be intolerant of negations, because they hollow out whatever tolerates them and lets them in. But how, precisely do they get in?

I would suggest the primary path is neutrality. Oh, it doesn't start there, of course. Negations nip at the fringes of the social fabric, slipping into serious clothing when they can to appear legitimate, driven by a collection of grievances they can wield against their opponents. But the moment they wear the mask of legitimacy, the politically neutral stance practiced by news media, for instance, elevates them and invites them into the mainstream. In part this is because the tenets of neutrality are a nothing, a nihil.

Neutrality isn't the same thing as centrism. Centrism attempts to sit in the middle of the bell curve, rejecting ideologies at either end of any particular political spectrum. That it can only do so within the bounds of the Overton window means that it also can be pushed and pulled, however slowly, by winds of discourse, so that what is centrist here and now isn't what may be centrist elsewhere and elsewhen. More pragmatically, however, centrism attempts to identify and guard against extreme ideologies, doing so from within the frame itself. It often succeeds in this, perhaps too well if you happen to hew to ideologies further to the left or right of the current mainstream.

But neutrality attempts to sit outside the frame entirely, propped up by a fervent belief or hope that the right combination of ritual language and public action are sufficient to maintain institutional legitimacy. Neutrality does not even allow the identification of extreme ideologies, because the act of doing so requires passing judgment, which the adherents of neutrality must avoid at all costs. Thus institutions mired in neutrality must treat all ideologies as on equal footing, regardless of the circumstances in which they arise. In this way, neutral institutions cannot help but allow negations to enter the mainstream, since doing otherwise would threaten their own sense of legitimacy. At best, when neutral institutions reinforce the status quo, they can operate with a minimum of cognitive dissonance. At worst, they are, in fact, participating in their own destruction.

Let's not pretend, however, that neutrality is either irrational or or powerless. Neutral institutions understand that their continued existence depends on not making overt enemies of the power players around them. Neutrality in that light is rational, since it's a survival mechanism. Similarly, neutral institutions wield considerable soft power. In the case of news media, this is through influence. In the case of other organizations it might look more like moral weight or just as a forum for political interchange through which others exercise their power and influence.

But crucially we must also not pretend that neutrality is actually neutral. Choice of language, choice of institutional focus, choice of response to changing circumstance, and other biases make neutrality an aspirational goal, an ideal. Therefore its only remit is power for the sake of it, cloaked in its own circular definition to distract from the idea that within, it is nothing.

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron

#books #reading #analysis

In my wayward youth, I practically lived at the library, picking up stacks of books to take home and devour. By the time I reached my teens, those books got bigger, and in many cases, more mature than what we would normally consider young adult fiction, or whatever. Cue the irony of having parents who strictly forbade Stephen King from my reading list on the basis of a sensationalized understanding of his work, but had no clue about the contents of the comparatively under-publicized works I consumed instead.

In search of fantasy series in my early teens, I stumbled on the works of Stephen R. Donaldson, specifically The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Like everything else I was reading at the time, I read every book of the series I could get my hands on, as well as other works I could find by the author. In the early 90s, the Thomas Covenant series comprised six books across two trilogies. Donaldson revived the series in 2004 with The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but by then I had long lost interest in the singularly unlikable protagonist.

Which brings me to the thing I remember most about the series: Thomas Covenant had remained in my mind among the worst protagonists in the history of SF/F. Since this is a bold assertion, I had wondered if Covenant was worth revisiting. So late in 2024, almost on a whim, I checked out an e-book copy of Lord Foul's Bane from the New York Public Library. Frustratingly, I failed to finish it before it was due, and am waiting to check it back out, but while I was reading it, I took public notes on it, which you can see in thread form on my Mastodon site.

What follows is an expanded version of this thread, aiming for an answer to a single question: What effect, if any, does 30 years between readings have on my view of Covenant as a protagonist?

There are spoilers ahead.

Additionally: content warning – sexual assault.

Thomas Covenant is a character whose view of the world has been profoundly shaken by his contraction of leprosy, an ancient disease characterized by its telltale deterioration of the body. As someone who grew up in Bible Belt America, leprosy was a familiar Biblical trope. I was aware via the Bible of how the societies described in the Gospels exiled lepers to colonies on the edge of town, proclaiming them unclean. I also understood at the time that leprosy was incurable, so it wasn't a stretch of my imagination to see a protagonist presented in the Biblical sense of leprosy. My understanding was wrong, however, even if Donaldson's presentation still made at least some narrative sense. So the first thing to do is to quickly review what we know now of leprosy.

Leprosy, aka Hansen's Disease, is caused by Mycobaterium leprae and Mycobaterium lepromatosis. M. leprae was discovered by the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen in 1873, while M. lepromatosis was discovered in 2008 (attributed to Han, et al.) Its effects include damage to nerves, the respiratory tract, eyes, and skin. The nerve damage can cause pain insensitivity leading to loss of extremities though infection and injury. In short, this is a disease with many visibly pronounced symptoms that are unmistakable, and which cause bodily deterioration. It is transmitted from person to person via extensive (but not incidental) contact, though this distinction hardly matters in a historical view, given the fear with which lepers were regarded.

This is probably a good time to interject with one of the unfortunate aspects of history as conveyed through the literature of the time. As a progressive skin disease, what we call leprosy today is just one of the possible skin diseases described by ancient texts and classified under the same name. So needless to say our modern understanding of leprosy doesn't cleanly map to an ancient understanding. Even so, the idea of a communicable skin disease that forced people into social exile is resonant, whatever it was or should have been called.

I'm not going to go into an extensive history of treatment, but by the 60s and 70s, multi-drug therapies (MDT) had shown high efficacy in treating the disease, settling in 1981 on the current MDT. Writing in the mid-70s, Donaldson may not have had all of this information at his fingertips. Had he started this series even a decade later, the situation would have been markedly different. That leaves us with a Covenant that, at the time of publication, believes himself to be incurable, forced to rearrange his life to accommodate his disease, performing regular visual inspections (VSE), and finds himself abandoned by his wife and ostracized from his small town community.

So this is the context for how we encounter Covenant, attempting to hold on to any last shred of human connection in a world that is systematically shutting him out. He is bitter, and rightly so. Not only has his wife left him and taken their son with her, the people in his small town have taken to having groceries delivered to him and paying his bills in advance specifically so he won't have any reason to come into town. They have weaponized generosity. In other circumstances, this sort of mutual aid would be commendable. After all, unless he can continue writing or find some other remote work occupation (sound familiar?), Covenant is unable to work and would, today, qualify for whatever total disability benefits his state offered. Which themselves aren't much, by design, and include long and arduous application processes, sometimes requiring a lawyer (ask me how I know). But applied this way, they are less “mutual aid” and more “pay to keep the leper in the leper colony”, even though that means enforced solitude. The leprosy itself is a narrative fix, something that only matters to hang the rest of the narrative on and justify the corner into which Donaldson has painted his protagonist.

It is during one of Covenant's trips into town, where he is attempting to pay his bills for himself, that he becomes the protagonist of a portal fantasy (or the similar concept, isekai). In a portal fantasy, the protagonist is someone from “our” world, transported to some other world, usually to accomplish some kind of Hero's Journey. It's important that the protagonist be someone the reader can relate to in some way, because their “everyman” character is in some ways a reader stand-in. In 70s fantasy fiction, this character usually was a man or, if the target age was younger, a boy or young man. That's a subject of litigation elsewhere, so I won't dwell on it here, but suffice it to say that we as readers are supposed to identify with the protagonist of a portal fantasy.

(Aside: While reading the Wikipedia entry for isekai, trying to find any notable differences between isekai and portal fantasy, I was amused to find that one common isekai trope is for the protagonist to die being hit by a car or truck, then reincarnate in the new world.)

Covenant traverses his portal by being hit by a police car. He suggests the policeman was targeting him, because by this point in the novel he suspects everyone of wishing him ill. This mentality colors every interaction he has with other people, because he's always expecting the shoe to drop. In any case, he “travels” after a cryptic conversation with a street beggar, waking in some kind of liminal space where Lord Foul confronts him to lay out the stakes: deliver a message to the Lords' Council spelling the end of the world in a matter of years. He shows that a creature named Drool possesses an item called The Staff of Law, and indicates that Covenant possesses power via his white gold wedding ring, but that he will not be able to master it in time. And then Foul casts Covenant out to land upon a high rock called Kevin's Watch. From this point, Covenant is fully in the new world.

There, atop the 500 foot spire, on a flat stone above a plain, a disoriented Covenant tries to make sense of his new surroundings, and there he meets his first inhabitant of this world, Lena, who hails from nearby Mithil Stonedown. It is at this point that Covenant begins his negotiation with this new reality. Is it a dream? Something else? He convinces himself it's a dream, because what else could it be? And this is something my teenage self maybe didn't appreciate as much. What would I really do if I awoke in a strange world? Would I believe it? Or would I deny it as Covenant does?

Everything that follows is cast in doubt as a potential product of Covenant's comatose mind. Because he can't conceive of this world as being real, neither can he conceive of any consequences for actions he takes within the world. He acts miserably, execrably, lashing out at the people of the Land, justifying his actions as necessary for him to retain control of his mind, which he fears will be lost if he succumbs to the place and accepts it as something other than a dreaming figment. It is in this state that he rapes Lena prior to setting off in the company of her unsuspecting mother.

When an author has presumably limited space and scope to tell a story, those limits impose a sort of narrative efficiency. The most charitable way to interpret this vis-à-vis the rape of a teenager at the hands of the (early middle-age?) protagonist is that Donaldson thought it added something necessary to the story. So far, I can't see what that is. Does Covenant come to regret it? Yes, eventually. But where I can be sympathetic to a man bereft of society and cursed to die slowly, this act greatly diminishes my sympathy. It doesn't even really matter if Covenant believed it was real or a dream.

At every turn, Covenant is resistant not only to the reality of the world presented to him, but also to the role that this world is thrusting upon him. In some ways, this is typical of portal fantasy, where the Chosen One must overcome initial doubt. I don't think we ever in the series get a clearly confident Covenant, one who has overcome that doubt. He grates against the role continually, and for what to my adult mind seem like rational reasons: this kind of heroism is best watched on screen, as something one reads about in books, or as something one plays out with dice and character sheets. Covenant is no easy hero, and since we know he's a wretch on top of being bitter and cynical, we don't get our heroic stand-in to allow us to feel similarly heroic.

I'll part with a brief meditation on what Donaldson might be doing here. Bearing in mind for a moment that an entire Fandom site dedicated to this 48 year old work, I haven't read any of it and am approaching this armed only with what I had previously read and the supplemental material about leprosy. Assuming the Land is all a figment of Covenant's sleeping mind, this reluctant Hero's Journey seems calculated to provide Covenant with additional resolve. He is, after all, confronted with an impossibility, much the same in his view of the leprosy diagnosis. It's an impossibility suddenly manifest, and he must negotiate with it or let it destroy him. In this light, Covenant is not our hero of the Land, Berek Half-Hand reincarnated. He is just a broken man grappling with the impossibility of his life.

Does that rehabilitate him in my mind? Well, in the waffling parlance of our time: it's complicated.

Further Reading

• Wikipedia: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
• Wikipedia: Leprosy
• Wikipedia: Hero's Journey
• Portal Fantasy and Isekai – What Are They?
• Thomas Covenant on Unbeliever Fandom

And tangentially related, because Covenant does seem to grasp the cost of heroism:

• A Hero Is Another Kind of Monster

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron

Took a little time to migrate from a Hugo static site to a Writefreely site. The Hugo site was using AWS Amplify and GitHub to deploy, which meant writing code, checking it in, pushing it, waiting for deploy, etc. I figure I write enough code, and for my blogs I would rather just write. Since it was Markdown, I was able to import all of the posts I wanted to bring over, with the rest sitting in the GitHub repository still (and on my hard drive). I've fixed the dates on all of them and will slowly go through and do enough editing to fix the titles, since they all used Hugo's Markdown frontmatter, as well as whatever I can to reproduce the original formatting, some of which has been lost in the migration.

Anyway, if you have bookmarks that broke, my apologies. And if you see weird formatting and links that should lead somewhere else on the blog, but don't, just know that I am getting to them when I can.

And meanwhile, my feed URL has changed: https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

What I'm not fixing: 1) Every dead link and embed. This is, alas, the nature of the Web. 2) Grammar and spelling errors in old posts. They've been there that long.

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron

I haven't posted one of these in a while, in part because my reading over the past several years had been too sporadic. For 2024, I didn't specifically plan out much, except for some time I was following along with the the reading schedule (delayed!) of Shelved By Genre, specifically as they read through Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series. Nevertheless, I managed more than I thought I would, and certainly more than I had in previous years, even if some of the reading was very slow. Anyway here's what I read.

1. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
2. Whale by Cheon Myong-kwan, translated by Chi-Young Kim
3. The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
4. (Abandoned) En Agosto Nos Vemos by Gabriel García Márquez
5. The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
6. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
7. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
8. Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
9. (Abandoned) Gloriana, or, The unfulfill'd queen : being a romance by Michael Moorcock
10. The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali, translated by Kareem Abdulrahman
11. Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson
12. Diplomatics: The Science of Reading Medieval Documents – A Handbook by Federico Gallo

I have sort of resolved to read down my pile of Archipelago Books, and am looking at a few standouts published in 2024. I also have in mind to read a bit more nonfiction, which I had almost completely abandoned. As usual, however, we'll see.

#reading #books

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron

#ai #technology #politics

It is important, even vital, for the principled technocrats and technologists to maintain their skepticism in the face of the growing “AI” threat, even to the point being and acting as the opposition. And yet we are losing. We probably will lose. “AI” is the populist demagogue of technology, singing a siren song of promises to fix what's broken. And people are listening.

We imagine ourselves, perhaps, as treading in the bloody footprints of Ned Ludd, ready at a moment's notice to smash these new looms that weave “information” from the pilfered fibers of the Internet. We smugly point out that the Luddites were right to fear the fruits of automation, and right to stand against them. But we can be right and still find ourselves in a rearguard battle as a hydra of misinformation closes off any hope of escape.

Unlike the Luddites, however, we have put ourselves here, because as technocrats and technologists, we have failed our users. What they want are tools to make their lives easier, to help them process increasing workloads efficiently, ultimately to better serve their users, as they imagine it. We have, of course, endeavored to deliver these tools, and we've developed ever more baroque and at times ideological rituals in our quest to deliver them. Through our mantras of user stories and agile development (that usually isn't agile at all), and our adherence to the the false religions of project management and performance management, we've anesthetized ourselves into gating off useful technologies.

And our users? They are discovering that ready access to “AI”, at least in its current LLM incarnation, a planet-devouring Ouroboros with a silver tongue and a penchant for just making shit up, offers a way past the wizened gates of the tehcnologists and technocrats, who are busy salting runes on the floors of their offices in the hopes of staving off project failure.

Users are voting. They will seek out and use these tools, which they know to be deeply flawed and probably dangerous, because these flawed and dangerous tools possess a different set of flaws and dangers from those of the technology gatekeepers. We've told them in the past that change is good, that change is inevitable, and that change means progress. Or some of us have, anyway, and our users have internalized this message. They will seize these tools and attempt to beat us at our own game. Since there are more of them than there are of us, they will likely succeed, if not on quality, then on strength of numbers alone.

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron

tags: #reading #books #readinglist #epics

Since mid-March, my reading schedule is provisional and inconsistent. Like many others, I am working from home, which has wreaked havoc on any sense of routine, even though I do my best to cling to what I can. Still, while I am confident that much of my original reading plan will stay firmly off the rails, there is no reason to abandon hope.

Often, I make plans but lose interest in them anyway. There's no guarantee I would have been in a different place in the absence of a global pandemic, because I am also an opportunistic reader who grabs an idea and runs with it until I find something that interests me more. Here's what I have been reading this year to date.

Completed

• Popol Vuh by Anonymous, translated by Dennis Tedlock. Excellent, enjoyable stories that elicit anger specifically because of how little survived the Spanish conquest.
• The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, which I picked up after having mailed a copy to my Reddit Secret Santa giftee. I will happily continue reading in this series.
• Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga. The best that can be said for this is that it's reactionary fanfic for white supremacists masquerading as scholarship.
• The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley. This modern recapitulation of Beowulf tells the story mostly (but not completely!) from Grendel's mother's point of view and served as a precursor to Headley's forthcoming translation of the original tale, due in August and slated for my September epic. I've preordered it from my local bookshop in hopes that a) they are in a safe position to fill the order, and b) it releases and distributes on time.
• Victor LaValle's Destroyer by Victor LaValle. Not a retelling so much as a fast-forward from the point after Frankenstein's monster disappears into the Arctic.
• The Tale of Sinuhe: And Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 B.C. by Unknown, translated by R.B. Parkinson. The main tale and some of the secondary tales are worth reading, but the fragmentary nature of some of the later works makes them difficult as anything but a completionist study.

Currently Reading

• Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet H. Murray. I haven't given up completely on game studies curriculum, but I don't seem to have much attention span for it at the moment either. For what it's worth, my podcasts are piling up for lack of commute time.
• The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I have several friends who rate this title as their favorite of Dostoyevsky's works. I can't compare yet, because I've only read Crime and Punishment and Demons.
• War Songs by Antarah ibn Shaddad. Even as a fan of epics, I find these poems by a celebrated pre-Islamic Arab poet and warrior to be much more violent than I expected. They do, however, provide a window into a time and place that are less familiar to me, which is why I chose the work.

Always Reading

• The Complete Poems by William Blake. I will never not be reading this. Blake is the mystical poet we need now, and I have every intention of reading all of his prophetic works, probably more than once.

Upcoming

Though provisional, I am still planning to make a go of the following over the next month or so:

The Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot and Keith Bosley (translator). This is the great Finnish epic that grew out of its oral tradition.

What Fell Off the List

• Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds by Jesper Juul
• Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity by Shira Chess

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron

tags: #reading #books #readinglist #epics #gamestudies

2019 was not a banner year for me in reading, a fact I blame on the lack of a reading list. I've come to realize that I need a some means of guiding my reading for the year, especially if I have a particular theme or set of themes I am exploring.

In keeping with earlier themes, I am returning in 2020 to epics, one a month if I can read that fast. To the extent possible, I am either steering clear of Western canon or approaching it from a different point of view. For instance, I plan to read feminist takes on both Beowulf and The Odyssey this year. In addition to epics, I am also planning to read one notable work in the field of game studies each month, basically using the Game Studies Study Buddies podcast as a curriculum. I may or may not have things to say about any of these as the year progresses, but what I do have to say I will publish on this site.

I have a number of works on prior lists I hope to use as supplemental reading, but I may post that list later as an addendum. I am in no particular hurry to organize it.

Let's build a reading list, shall we?

December 2019

For the rest of this month, I plan to read Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture by Alexander R. Galloway. This is a set of essays exploring the video game as an independent medium and distinct cultural form. This book, as well as Homo Ludens below, was a gift from my Reddit Secret Santa, and happens to be short enough that I'll be able to read it within the next couple of weeks as the year winds down.

January 2020

Epic

Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of The Mayan Book of The Dawn of Life and The Glories of Gods and Kings, translated by Dennis Tedlock

This is the Quiché Mayan book of creation, detailing the deeds of the Mayan gods and the rise of the Quiché kingdom in the Guatemalan highlands. It is one of the most important surviving pre-Columbian texts we have available.

Game Studies

Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga

Something of a classic in the game studies curriculum, this seminal work provides an evaluation of play as a central activity of flourishing cultures.

Fevral

(Note: Unless absolutely required, I will never after this point type February.)

Epic

The Tale of Sinuhe: and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 B.C. (Oxford World's Classics), translated by R.B. Parkinson

This collection of poems offers English speaking readers a glimps into the golden age of Egyption fictional literature.

Game Studies

Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet H. Murray

The updated version of this book offers commentary on the original, explaining what panned out and what didn't. The book created instant controversy upon its publication in 1997, but she also made some interesting predictions along the way.

March

Epic

Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (Revised Edition) by D T Niane

This is a work of oral tradition pinned down and captured in text. True, it was never intended to be transmitted this way, but this story, part history, part legend, tells of how Sundiata united the twelve kingdoms of Mali and built an empire.

Game Studies

Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul

Juul studies the tension between rules and fiction in video games, and examines the role computers play in mediating this tension.

April

Epic

War Songs, by Antarah ibn Shaddad and James E. Montgomery (translator)

Writing from the 6th century Najd highlands of the Arabian peninsula, the warrior-poet recounts his struggles for recognition. These poems are attributed to Antarah ibn Shaddad, the subject of a later epic, The Epic of 'Antar.

Game Studies

Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity, by Shira Chess

Chess examines the implicit assumptions game designers and developers make about women as an audience for gaming, especially how they reinforce normative ideas about women.

May

Epic

The Kalevala: An Epic Poem after Oral Tradition, assembled by Elias Lönnrot and translated by Keith Bosley

This is the national folk epic of Finland, and grew out of its oral traditions, preserved well into the 19th century.

Game Studies

Games of Empire, by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter

What is the role of video games in the media of Empire, and what is the impact of this role on creators and players?

June

Epic

Florante y Laura (Spanish Edition), by Francisco Baltazar

This Spanish edition of a Filipino romance is an epic poem about the love and determination of the Duke Florante and the Princess Laura of Albania while being pursued by the usurper Count Adolfo.

Game Studies

The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop, by Kyra D. Gaunt

This work illustrates how black musical styles are incorporated into the earlies games African American girls learn.

July

Epic

The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser

Arthurian romance cum Italian renaissance epic recounting the quests of each of various knights to achieve a virtue.

Game Studies

Man, Play and Games, by Roger Caillois

This is a study of what games are, and what their place in our lives is.

August

Epic

The Odyssey, by Homer, Emily Wilson (translator)

The club consisting of translators of The Odyssey in to English gained its first female member when Emily Wilson published this authoritative translation in 2017.

Game Studies

Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, by Espen J. Aarseth

Central to this text are questions of whether computer games make great literature, and whether video games are supplanting other narrative forms, or eliminating pure narrative entirely.

September

Epic

Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley

Release date: August 25, 2020. This is a new, feminist translation of the beloved work, the earliest in the English language.

Game Studies

Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect, by Aubrey Anable

What is the role of video games in our larger emotional landscape?

October

Epic

Epic of the Forgotten: Bulgarian-English Dual Language Text, by Ivan Vazov, Mark J Ripkowski

Vazov wrote this to commemorate the Bulgarian fight for freedom against the Ottoman Empire, and to criticize the decline of the Bulgarian nation after the Liberation.

Game Studies

Beyond a Boundary: 50th Anniversary Edition, by C. L. R. James

A classic work of sport and culture through the lens of cricket. (It's a departure from the other kinds of games explored above.)

November

Epic

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights: Volume 1, by Anonymous, Robert Irwin

Timeless and unforgettable tales within tales woven by the incomparable Shahrazad as she seeks to prolong her life each night. This work encompasses three volumes.

Game Studies

Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater, by Gina Bloom

On the traditoinal theatrical concepts in gaming.

December

Epic

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights: Volume 2, by Anonymous, Robert Irwin

Game Studies

Literary Gaming, by Astrid Ensslin

An examination of literary videogames, or the literary-ludic spectrum.

(pause for breath...)

You may notice that I have left off at 2/3 of the 3 volume set of The Arabian Nights, which you can take to mean that this list ultimately carries me into January 2021 unless I get to it sooner. I will readjust this list as necessary, pointing you to the changelog if you're interested, because I assume I will read some things faster and some things slower, and I would prefer to keep trucking instead of merely waiting for the end of the month. Beyond the end of this current list, I have a tentative schedule worked out for 2021, believe it or not. At that point I plan to turn to some classical Chinese literature, starting with The Journey to the West and proceeding with The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber. The timing and contents of the 2021 list will undoubtedly evolve as I make faster or slower progress on the 2020 list, which is not arranged to optimize page count. There are short books and long books on this list.

One other thing I should note is that, while I am confident in the idea of reading in and around game studies, I have no idea if I will be able to sustain this much interest in the topic for the whole year, or if this particular set of books will be the ultimate list. As I post changelogs to this page, you can follow along with the evolution of this list. In case I abandon the game studies reading list entirely, I will begin supplementing with some prior lists, still TBD.

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron

tags: #roundups #media #music #books #podcasts

A roundup of my media consumption for the year.

Music

I come at music like this: I try lots of things, but take note of little. What rises to the top for me isn’t necessarily what others find great (and in fact I can’t always see the greatness others see), but rather something, usually idiosyncratic, that helps the artist stand out. That’s not to say I am completely ignorant of things like airplay and promotional hype, nor do I fully reject those aspects of an artist's trajectory, but I don't necessarily march to the same beat. Anyway, here's what I found worth my time this year.

My Apple Music playlist of the following is here: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/2019-top-music/pl.u-MDAWWqNI40l5e0

1. J.S. Ondara – Tales of America: Spare but rich and commanding bluesy acoustic songs offering a newcomer’s take on America’s promise. Ondara, an immigrant from Nairobi, is definitely one to watch.
2. Michael Kiwanuka – Kiwanuka: On his third album, Michael Kiwanuka narrates a world of violence and racism through pensive, melancholy psych-soul melodies.
3. Heilung – Futha: Otherworldly neofolk chants that attempt to amplify a particular history, that of pre-Christian Nothern Europe and, like Skald below, a welcome counterpoint to generic metal acts in Viking cosplay.
4. Zao – Reformat / Reboot: This remix compilation of the venerable metalcore gestalt that is Zao was notable not just for the electronic touches the remix infuses, but also because, inexplicably, there is (or was) a NES cartridge version of the album available. This gimmick is not a detractor: the music is genuinely enjoyable even though I’m something of a metalcore outsider.
5. Chris Forsyth – All Time Present: This mostly instrumental album showcases Forsyth’s exceptional skill with the guitar as he and his backing band take us on an extensive journey through experimental classic rock riffs.
6. Billie Eilish – When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?: I’m not sure what needs to be said about this. If you somehow missed the incredible buzz around Eilish’s debut album, let me encourage you to give her a first look.
7. SKÁLD – Vikings Chant: Skald want to answer the question of whether and to what extent a French musical act can revive the ancient Viking poetic traditions. In large part, the answer is yes.
8. Dream Theater – Distance Over Time: The unquestioned prog-metal kings are back with an album that is solidly in their wheelhouse, showing that they still have staying power while also not quite meeting the stratospheric bar they’ve set in the process.
9. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Ghosteen: Ghosteen is Nick Cave’s first full reckoning of the grief of a lost child. It is a deeply personal collection of impressions and haunting melodies born of finding oneself engulfed in a darkness for which no preparation would have been sufficient.
10. Sleep Token – Sundowning: This long awaited debut album is an idiosyncratic collection of pop metal worship ballads by an anonymous group. What they’ve built in the lead up to this album is a successful marketing and promotion machine that happens to produce great music.
11. Vampire Weekend – Father of the Bride: It’s been a while since this group has released anything, and the intervening years, lineup changes and a cross-country move all add up to a different band than the one that emerged in 2008. Class consciousness infuses this album of anthems, folksy ballads, spirituals, and catchy pop country tunes. Is it the mark of maturation?
12. Mdou Moctar – Ilana (The Creator): High energy spontaneous and celebratory Tuareg guitar from Niger, this album is full of desert assouf – that elusive term that evokes loneliness, longing, nostalgia, and everything that lies beyond the comfort of the campfire.
    

Books

Okay, well, look. 2019 was not a banner year for me and books. I never really developed much of a reading plan, which even if I don’t always follow it, it is still something to guide me. Anyway, that’s not to say I read nothing, just that I lost a lot of steam this year. I read 13 books, but had set my goal at 25. Some of the reason I got nowhere near my goal is that I picked up a couple of very lengthy books, one of which I finished and the other of which may be a near-perennial almost-read.

I started the year off with a book that I had kicking around a while, Natsume Soseki’s The Three-Cornered World, which was a gift from a friend in 2017 or 2018. It is the curse of the avid reader to have more books to read than time to read them, which underscores the surprise of actually getting to a book that's been on one's shelves for a while.

A timely event at the Korea Society prompted me to read Heinz Insu Finkl's new translation of The Nine Cloud Dream, which was a nice follow-on to the previous work.

Theater screenings of a number of Studio Ghibli films was the impetus behind my read this year of Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle. The book was as compelling as the film, but I think I prefer Miyazaki.

Back in January, the New York Times published Globetrotting, a sneak preview of books coming out in 2019 from around the world. So I took on a few. The first of these was All My Goodbyes by Mariana Dimópoulos, followed by Guillermo Saccomanno's 77 and Adèle by Leila Slimani.

When I cleaned up my Twitter account a while back, I stopped following all the corporate accounts I had accumulated, ditched anyone who looked like a Nazi, and otherwise gave my account a thorough scrub. What I found is that I have a soft spot for authors, especially authors I've read and like, so as a consequence, I follow more authors than perhaps any other category of people. The result of this, of course, is that I hear about other authors, so when Hafsah Faizal came across my radar with We Hunt the Flame, the first book in her Sands of Arawiya trilogy, I was instantly intrigued and pre-ordered it. I eagerly await the next installments.

Two more works out of the pages of the New York Times Book Review grabbed me over the summer: Thomas Harris, who is apparently a Big Deal, released Cari Mora, which was entertaining enough, and I also read Erica Ferencik's Into the Jungle, which was also worth the time.

Coming back around to things I have long overlooked but regret having done so, I picked up Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed. It was good. Really good. And it saddens me that there is not so much more fantasy set against non-European backdrops and inspirations.

Did I mention that I mined my own shelves for reading material? Two other books I picked up this year have been on my shelves for a while, and I finally got around to them. The first of these was The Princess Bride by William Goldman. Look, I've seen the movie enough times that I could probably, with some time and thought, reproduce the dialogue line by line pretty accurately. The book is so much deeper, and it opens windows into character motivation that would have strengthened the movie. I don't want to spoil it, but you should read it. The second of these was The Stand by Stephen King. I started reading this book as a teenager, but had to put it down (though not out of lack of interest), and I never got back around to it. The copy I have now was gifted to me by a Reddit secret Santa. Of all the works I've read this year, this is the only one I have even tried to write a review of (which I guess I better get back to).

The final read of the year, though it was actually wedged between the previous two, was one that my 13 year old was assigned as summer reading before starting 8th grade. Ann Rinaldi's Numbering All the Bones is a historical novel about one girl's attempts to heal the trauma of the American Civil War.

Podcasts

I wish I could find good statistics on the hours and hours I've spent listening to podcasts this year, but I don't see them. In any case, my podcast habit is what gets me to and from work, and sometimes fills other idle times, especially long dog walks. Instead of simply listing out all the individual podcasts I listen to, I will offer a list of my current favorites.

1. Druidcast
   Frequency: Monthly on our around the 20th.
   From their website:
   > ...each episode features poetry, story and song offered by Bards throughout the world. There are also interviews with people involved in the Druid tradition, and related areas, plus seasonal thoughts, explorations of Celtic mythology and history, reviews, and competitions.

2. In Our Time
   Frequency: Weekly
   Description: Wide ranging podcast produced by BBC Radio, exploring the history of various ideas, people, places, literary works, etc.

3. Game Studies Study Buddies
   Frequency: Monthly or so.
   From the website:
   > Games Studies Study Buddies is a podcast that makes academic games studies accessible, text by text. Rather than focusing on following or forging a “canon” of the discipline, media scholar Cameron and literature scholar Michael instead aim to cover an eclectic body of material. And while we are centrally focused on contemporary videogames, you can expect our discussions (and the work we cover) to account for everything from Dungeons & Dragons to tic-tac-toe.

4. Death By Monsters
   Frequency: Weekly
   From the website:
   > Death by Monsters is a weekly podcast with Matthew Jude, Nick Murphy and Paula Deming, three friends with very different opinions on monsters, mysteries and the unknown.

5. The Dream
   Frequency: Biweekly?
   Description: Produced for Stitcher, this seasonal series examines various industries. Season 1 examined MLMs, and Season 2 look like it's focused on Wellness. I'm about to bump this to the top of my list.

I listen to a number of other podcasts as well, but these are the ones I wanted to share for this year.

What's up for next year?

One thing I learned from this year is that a reading list goes a long way, so I will put one up soon, and I'm pleased to say that I will be returning to epics for another round of that sweet sweet mythology. If you've followed my reading journeys before, then you will have done so on different websites. For a variety of reasons, I am consolidating all of those posts and all future posts here, in a place that I own and control. So that's another way of saying to watch this space for more details.

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron

When we come face to face with the inadequacies of HERE and NOW, we tend to yearn for other times and places. For some, the yearning amounts to nostalgia for eras that may not have even existed, the so-called “good old days”. For others, in an attempt to find some escape from the problems of their own city, state, or country, the yearning is for some other country that “gets it right”. For still others, it’s not so much a spatial or temporal pursuit, but instead one of adopting the right thoughts or behaviors in the hope of salvation. But this yearning is, in the case of the spatial and temporal, farcical, because absent from it is a realistic understanding of the problems that the people of these other times and places confronted. In the case of the behavioral and attitudinal, it is merely inadequate.

Leaving a place and coming back is always fraught. Even if the place has been held in perfect stasis, the leaver and the returner are different people, and the magic that the place held is attenuated. Time, of course, is not something we can revisit, and our attempts to cobble the bones of the past onto the present are a misguided inversion. The past is the accreted structure on which the present rests, and either ignoring the past entirely or knocking down the superficial accretions to root around in the bones means that we can never draw actual lessons from the past. Some part of me is absolutely convinced that humans lack the capacity to learn from the past anyway.

All this would be a trite retelling of existing cliches, though, if I were to stick only to the common reading of the idea. I think we can extend the metaphor to encompass a more universal condemnation of our efforts at “progress”, this myth that somehow, if we perform the right series of actions, uncover the right knowledge, and adopt the right attitudes, that we can achieve some lasting, objective moral good in the world. If we are truly capable of this, we have yet to demonstrate it, not only because there is no external arbiter of moral good, but also because we are good at segmenting ourselves from the evils of our ancestors even while we dress their reincarnations in science and practice them anyway.

Let’s put it this way. Every empire is built from the bones and blood of those it conquered, plus the bones and blood of those pressed into service to expand and maintain it. Every beneficiary of that empire is implicated in the actions the empire took to achieve whatever it achieved and to maintain itself. It hardly matters whether a particular citizen stood on a battlefield or personally tore down the home or business of one of the empire’s enemies. Those activities are the grinding gear teeth of the great imperial machine, but the body politic is the mass of the wheels and cogs that turn those teeth.

“My empire is bad,” you (not metaphorically) might say to yourself. “I’ll vote with my feet and leave.” In the Exit, Voice, and Loyalty paradigm, this is the Exit. If you have the resources to flee (and most of us don’t), you may find a place that welcomes you. But fleeing in this way almost guarantees you’ll never be able to return. In this sense I don’t even mean that the place will have changed. Abdication of one’s contingent birthright is a betrayal of the bestower, even if it’s fundamentally absurd to parcel the world into neat borders when no such demarcations exist between neighboring peoples. If you don’t find a place that accepts you, then you may face one of two cruelties: the first is being stateless in a stateful world; and the second is being deported to a country you’ve repudiated by your Exit. When people flee political violence or the fear of it, to deport them back to the place that would enact that violence after their Exit has demonstrated to the State that, in the State’s view, they deserve it is a monstrous cruelty.

In addition to the risk of landing on unwelcoming shores, you risk trading one empire of bone and blood for another. Only this new devil is one you can’t recognize as easily, because it is disguised by language and cultural differences and a history you probably don’t know. This is perhaps the biggest mistake anyone makes in coming to America as an immigrant or simply to work for a time in a diplomatic or international capacity. Nobody can fault them for lacking a grasp of American history, because the history we teach in our own schools has been a fiction since it was written. But where we fail to understand our actual history, we nevertheless live out its implications and can, with some earnest inquiry, learn to see past the spectacle of our schoolhouse propaganda. To become an American is to wear the mantle of guilt that plagues the American experiment and its bipartite sins: slavery and genocide.

Voice is probably the only option left to most of us, and as I suggested above, it is merely inadequate. You can exercise what freedoms are permitted under the system in which you live. Most are a matter of style, not of substance. And if you live anywhere in the West, the majority of it has been packaged and sold to you via the religion of Capitalism. In fact, so insidious is Capitalism that it implicates even the saints and contaminates their virtues.

What is a saint, anyway? For purposes of this argument, I’ll define a saint as someone whose actions can be held to an identifiable virtue, where a virtue is some idea that purports to be an improvement in the material or moral conditions of humans, the world, etc. Saints, in other words, live and act according to what they consider higher standards than others and do so out of a sense that their standards have a measurably positive impact on the world. It hardly matters what particular human activities are virtuous and which practitioners of humanity are saints by this definition. What matters is that their acts of saintliness, no matter how purely motivated, are tainted by their association with the society around them. Since ours is thoroughly infected by Capitalism, theirs are as well.

There is no more poignant example of “you can’t go home/anywhere” than when applied to saints. Saints who arrive at their saintliness via rejection of prevalent attitudes will be rejected in turn if they try to return home, and the taint of Capitalism ensures they can’t go anywhere else either. They are implicated no matter how virtuous.

As an example, let’s take the ideal of veganism. It seems simple enough to parse, right? Don’t consume products that derive from animals. But by consume, do we mean eat? Buy? Use? And what does it mean to derive from animals? Do we mean made of one or more animal parts? Does it matter if they aren’t killed? Do we mean made with the labor of animals? What if animals are incidentally involved? Or used for testing? And does it matter if we couldn’t possibly know? Also, what is a product? Do we count second-hand items, or only newly produced? And what about items that are made from animal parts but are secondary uses or byproducts of the primary uses? Or items derived from animals that are so integral to, say, medicine, that we would die without them? Are there any ethical uses? And where are the lines? Does the intent matter at all?

Many other such virtues are less complex than this, but I picked veganism because it offers a wealth of avenues by which to interrogate our theme. Let’s say you start from a couple of positions that lead down the road to veganism. You might say you want to reduce suffering in the world, and one obvious way to do that is to refrain from killing animals to sustain you. So you remove meat from your diet and eat plants and use plant-based products. But guess what system ruthlessly exploits animals while simultaneously bringing you enough plants to eat? You rely on Capitalism to deliver oranges in the winter, but doing so requires that you rely on it to overcrowd miserable cows, pigs, and chickens while they’re fattened for slaughter. At best you can buy a version of this that provides better living conditions for the condemned animals, but nothing outside of science fiction will deliver them from the fear of the slaughter. Can you accept the stain?

Let’s iterate a bit. You refrain from eating meat, don’t buy leather, and you’ve found a pretty comprehensive set of plant-based replacements for your other daily products. But wait a minute. Do you know how much modern medicine depends on the exploitation of animals? Injectable drugs rely on the antibacterial properties of hemocyanin, sourced by capturing and methodically bleeding horsehoe crabs. And now we have begun to genetically engineer pigs from which we can harvest organs to save human lives. If you ever need injectable drugs or aren’t choosy enough when it comes to an organ transplant, is that okay? Can you accept that stain too?

One more. Many durable substances derive from animals, and we have synthetic variants of most of them. In most cases, those synthetic variants derive from petroleum, the use of which is part of a real, existential threat to humanity, as well as to many other living things. Do we do better to avoid the use of animals here by risking their and our extinction through the use of fossil fuels? Can you accept that stain too?

There is nowhere to go, at least nowhere a human can conceive of and still be human. And by the time you realize it, there won’t be a place to come back to either.

#virtue #ethics #capitalism #vice

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron