Category Archives: Other Writing

Week in Review: 22-29 December 2021

Read:

“Compulsory Games” by Robert Aickman
“The Mask” by Robert W. Chambers
“In the Court of the Dragon” also by Chambers
Things have gotten worse since we last spoke by Eric LaRocca
Some amount of Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson by Tara T. Green
Dangerous Dimensions

Watched:

The Witcher Season 2 (partial)
Some episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Season 2)

There was also Christmas and family events and all that, so it’s been a busy week.

Aickman (musings)

Aickman in particular has made a very strong impression on me. I started with his story “Hand in Glove” (all of my reading of Aickman comes from the NYRB collection of his works Compulsory Games edited and introduced by Victoria Nelson). My initial response to that story was, ‘This is too English for me to really understand it.’ Which might seem silly, but there have been times where that particular flavor of English reticence and ingrained class conscious conflict (among other cultural factors) has utterly baffled and alienated me.

My second go-round with Aickman, which I was considering after I wrapped up “Dangerous Dimensions” and had to (sullenly and with much grumbling) reassess my view of Algernon Blackwood (I wasn’t a fan of “The Willows” — the vacillation between unhinged hysteria and obviously doomed attempts to rationalize the supernatural was exhausting and somewhat irritating), I felt it was only just to give Aickman another shot.

I finished the story “Compulsory Games” which I had already begun the previous time I had picked up the book. And after finishing it, no more certain of what I had just experienced that I was at the end of “Hand in Glove”, I turned to Nelson’s introduction to the volume of Aickman’s fiction. While I disagree with some of her points about “the horror genre” as a comprehensive whole (Of black humor she says, “Like sex, this element, and its prerequisite of a sophisticated sensibility, is usually absent in the horror genre.” (p. xii) I also feel that her view that sex is necessarily or usually absent from horror fiction holds true only in certain eras of the genre. But my rapturous and irrepressible rhapsodizing about Livia Llewelyn will have to wait for another day.)

Most importantly, Nelson helpfully contextualizes Aickman’s fiction as being not necessarily “supernatural” so much as “unnatural.” (p. viii) And indeed, thus far it seems best to approach Aickman with the tacit recognition that no explanation is forthcoming, and that any attempts to classify or qualify the experience of his characters according to known modes will result in abject failure. Here, again, Nelson fails to distinguish between the “neatly wrapped up” ending of the traditional ghost story or gothic model of the tale, where the supernatural elements are controlled, contained, and neutralized within the narrative, and the often more ambiguous, unresolved “explanations” of authors generally associated with the Weird.

Indeed, by this measure of irreducible weirdness Aickman can, without a doubt, be counted among the writers of the weird. However, I believe his fiction may leave some readers wanting for something a bit more coherent than what is actually on offer within his stories. He, for the most part, avoids the irritating sensation that he, the author, is as ignorant of understanding as the reader. But nor does he convey the absolute confidence of some other writers (Laird Barron comes to mind, and even Michael Cisco) that he is in full command of his concocted un-reality, and merely choosing to omit an easy answer for the benefit (or frustration) of the reader.

All this to say, more to follow on Aickman soon. I have 13 more stories to go in this volume.

Dangerous Dimensions (1st and 2nd Impressions)

When ordering books for the store, my boss read the title of this book and said, ‘Hey this is the book for you!’

Indeed, I keep threatening that once I get my act together I’ll figure out how to design a t-shirt graphic that conveys “spooky polyhedra” à la “Dreams in the Witch-House.” I love the somewhat ridiculous – though often extremely effective – notion of maddening and mind-bending mathematics. Who needs monsters when you can have equations that rend the very fabric of the known universe?

Unfortunately, Dangerous Dimensions takes us back to the early applications of the discovery of a “Fourth Dimension” (other than time), starting with H.G. Wells’ “Title”. I found this one almost unbearable. Here the fourth dimension becomes a kind of pseudo-scientific purgatory, where the souls of the dead spectate the lives of the still-living. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with the story, but it really got into a particular kind of religious- or piously inflected supernatural horror which has never ‘done it’ for me.

The other notable stinker in the collection for me was “Space” by John Buchan. In a sense the introduction to Buchan and his story were of greater issue than the story itself. This volume contains one of the Lovecraft collaborations, and almost the entire introduction to the story/authors for that entry is given over to superficial discussion of Lovecraft’s racism, to the point where I learned nothing about Henry S. Whitehead. Now, “Space” is a story whose entire set-up relies heavily on the notion that Europeans are a more “evolved” form of man and have lost the senses unique to animals and “Savages” which allow them to distinguish the fourth dimension of ‘space’.

I’m not here to rampage against the impolitic and backwards “scientific views” portrayed in the story, but I do take issue with the notion that Lovecraft has become the popular repository for all discussion about racism and eugenic description in genre literature of a particular era. Race featured in a negligible capacity in the Whitehead & Lovecraft story (the 16th century evil Austrian magician or whatever he was had two Black slaves, which is unpleasant and perhaps upsetting but does not really conform with the more egregious elements of Lovecraft’s unpalatable social and scientific views on race). Meanwhile, “Space” displays the very form of ‘eugenic epistemology’ which so tarnishes Lovecraft’s work, and not a single mention of the evolutionary rhetoric is included in the introduction to the story itself.

That is to say: string them all up.

The story itself was fine, but the discussion of the “aboriginal savage” which dominates the beginning of the story definitely left me feeling the strain of having to look past the less than savory socio-political-epistemological aspects.

The stand-out winners in the collection were, for me, Donald Wandrei’s “Infinity Zero” and the Robert Heinlein story “…and he built a crooked house…”. The former has inspired me through its vivid imagery to finally attempt a suitably ‘mathematic’ Weird illustration, as well as being genuinely freaky. The science is also quite good.

Meanwhile, the latter – the Heinlein – was so funny that I’m perplexed no one has adapted it to cinema as of yet. It would make for a very fun, and very funny, little film. Strong visuals, and a lighthearted and enjoyable tone. Some minor “updating” might be required to render the female character a little more palatable for a contemporary audience, but I’m sure there are people who would utterly fail to recognize the light misogyny which persists within the characterizations.

On the whole, it was a solid collection. I felt that the editor tipped his hand a bit including two Blackwood stories (a personal favorite and academic interest of the editor) but I must admit that both Blackwood stories were pretty good. Enough that I’m seriously considering searching up more of the John Silence stories for future reading.

Quick Notes on Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

I have plenty to say about Eric LaRocca’s Things have gotten worse… Though not perhaps as many to say as the run-away hit of the season merits. The big one is that while I expected it to go one way (and then after the first twist another way, and then yet another way after the second twist) it never really went where you expected it to go. This means that though the experience is deeply horrifying and made my skin hurt, it was never banal.

I must admit that I’m not sure the book ever really tips over into the realm of “erotic horror” but the bar/standard I have for that was set by Livia Llewelyn (specifically the collection Furnace), then solidified with Steven Berman’s Fit for Consumption, with an honorable mention for That One Story in Bracken MacLeod’s 13 Views from the Suicide Woods. Which is to say, an epistolary narrative is unlikely to meet the necessary qualifications of embodiment to really make the “erotic horror” grade. This is in no way a criticism of the book itself, but rather the way the presentation implies a particular tone or expectation which is not quite fulfilled.

Mr. LaRocca certainly has my attention. My tastes run toward the more supernatural than the mundane in the annals of horror and weird fiction, but LaRocca’s characters are so vividly painted and pleasingly complete (if utterly unhinged) that I would be willing to venture into the depths of the believably horrible with his prose charting the path.

That’s certainly MORE than enough words on any number of topics. And I’ll be back with some slightly more fleshed out reviews as well as a few musings like “What exactly is appetite in horror?” (Brought to you by Fit for Consumption where food and sex make for natural if discomfiting bedfellows.) Formal reviews for the above mentioned collections should be forthcoming, and something a little meatier for Mr. LaRocca’s work as well, when I finish digesting it. (I only finished the book two nights ago.) As well as hopefully something on Jeffery Ford’s Big Dark Hole collection, which I am part-way through.

Dreaming of all the endings

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I used to wake up in a blind panic in the middle of the night, nerves alight with the horror not of dying but of watching the rest of the world die, and be swept away by forces too strong and too organic, too natural, to ever withstand.

When I was 13, they showed the movie Slither at the 24 Hour Boston Science Fiction film marathon. I didn’t want to watch it, all too aware of my fragile psycho-emotional capacity, but my friends, being boys of a certain age, knew that watching me scream and flinch would only make the experience that much better for them. I can still remember the way the movie was supposed to be funny, but even now, with the hindsight of a decade and a half of experience and a hard won love of horror movies, those moments are still burned into my brain with revulsion and abject, animal fear.

The next year, I went with friends to see Cloverfield, another film I knew I would regret, but I was unwilling to be left out of the social experience of going to see the big sci-fi flick of the summer, the R-rated horror movie everyone was talking about. The jokes are funnier this time around, but everyone told me that I looked like the friend with the curly hair who exits the narrative by exploding in silhouette behind a tarp in a flurry of screaming and pushy army National guardsmen.

The nightmares woke me up and kept me from sleeping. I would lie, paralyzed in the dark, my heart pounding, sweating, terrified, occasionally creeping across the hall to listen at my parents’ door to their snoring, the reminder that no one had yet died, and that my loneliness was an inevitability from which I was separated by time, the clutch of terror being that of not knowing what time that would be.

This was when I started sleeping with the lights on.

For many years I slept in a tent in my bedroom, futon on the floor, while the floor lamp illuminated the space around it, a desperate attempt to the keep the nightmares and the panic attacks at bay.

My sleep was disordered, from ADHD (undiagnosed and untreated) and depression (untreated) and anxiety (undiagnosed and untreated), but sleeping with the lights off became a priority. It couldn’t be good for my circadian rhythm. Staying up all night on the computer couldn’t be good for my circadian rhythm, no matter how good insomnia and the internet are for keeping the nightmares at bay.

These are the years where I dream of barricading myself on the top floor of our house while the ravenous living dead shuffle and groan their way through my neighborhood. No matter how successful my planning is within these dreams, I know that nothing can save me. Survival is not contingent, because death is (and always has been) inevitable. Once my mother and my father and my friends and neighbors have been overtaken by this calamity, there is nothing left except the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins, and the brains in my head, and I’m not sure I’ll still want them.

This is when I try to tell myself that bodies which no longer have hearts that beat or neurons that fire will inevitably succumb to rigor Morris, and in time to the natural process of decay. 28 Days Later ruins any hopes we have that this threat comes from the supernatural logics which govern the undead and can safely be overcome by healthy skepticism and adequate information regarding the death and decomposition process.

This is when I tell myself that I am already undead. When I was 4 months old, I went in for open heart surgery to fix my total anomalous pulmonary venus return, a birth defect where the cardiac plumbing is incorrectly hooked up, and so oxygenated blood returns directly to the heart and then to the lungs, without passing to the rest of the body. The defect had gone unnoticed because I had been born with another, fairly common, heart defect, which amounts to a hole between the chambers of the heart. That hole had been allowing blood to get to the rest of my body, but as I grew, the hole started to heal and close (a natural process which would have made the whole thing a non-issue in a properly put together infant). This caused the blood flow to the rest of my body to become interrupted.

To perform this open heart surgery, they had to lower my body temperature into the safe zone where decay and decomposition won’t set in and stop my heart while they made the adjustments which would allow the organ to properly pump blood throughout my body.

My heart had stopped, my body had been rendered “dead” for some in- or significant amount of time. By this logic, in some metaphysical sense, I was not just a living body, but a body rendered living and alive through unnatural means, a zombie, a walking corpse.

To be clear, I didn’t believe myself to be, actually, literally, dead. There were moments where I wished for Cotard’s Syndrome, imagined that delusion would save me from my existential dread. No, I was well aware that I was bargaining with the universe on technicalities, well aware that there was no Devil, no Satan for me to go against wit-for-wit like some kind of sniveling Daniel Webster.

But trying to plug the broken airlock of terror when we look into the abyss with the pathetic tissue paper of logic has never worked well for anyone, and I am no exception.

Maybe this was when I dreamed the dream where rather than fighting to live as I once had, I dreamt myself given over to the mercy of un-death, a new phantasmagoria where the parents of my childhood friends became herders of elephantine domesticated human livestock. This dream, when I described it to a friend of mine, made him agree that perhaps I should stay away from psychedelic or other psychoactive substances. By this time I had learned that the beauty of nightmares is that we wake up from them.

Ecological cataclysm and the crushing weight of capitalism have both driven me to the edge (and then, ultimately, over) of nervous breakdown. There were weeks in my freshman year of college where I couldn’t stand to participate in conversations about the weather because heart pounding, sweaty panic that would descend over my consciousness when I thought about our sudden and overwhelming snowfall or unseasonably balmy afternoons.

Chicken wings and, later, classes on the industry of meat production and the eco hazard of corn and soy monocultures and the yoking of farmers to poverty through genetic intellectual property made it impossible for me to eat first meat, and then anything at all without the sick feeling of guilt taking us residence inside me with each bite.

I used to worry about the end of the world.

And then it happened.

I tell the story with a laugh, but inside me something has yet to fully unclench from its position braced for impact.

“I used to have nightmares and lose sleep to panic attacks at the thought of a global pandemic,” I told my therapist and later my friends. “And now it’s happening. It’s so much more boring than I thought it would be.”

I always imagined the apocalypse would be a cataclysm. Too many years of atomic age science fiction, where the world ends in an instant.

I used to be afraid of the speed at which the world might change.

This year, I went from never having seen a corpse to having seen two. A mercy would be for Death to come unexpectedly, from behind. Not like the way night falls, slowly, by increments, an inevitability we must anticipate for hours or days, waiting for the moment when we can finally say, “That was the last bit of light,” as the darkness presses in from all sides.

Zelda, Calamity, and Living Beyond The End

Rationality and Superstition, some thoughts on reckoning in Weird Fiction

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One of the things I find most fascinating in Lovecraft’s writing is the way in which the structure of his fiction actively undermines the very things he claims and seems to hold dear.

I’m currently reading Jason Colavito’s The Cult of Alien Gods, (more on his most recent book: The Mound Builder Myth some time soon). In one of the first chapters––I’m sorry, I’m reading it on the Kindle and it’s an impressively badly structured file, none of the footnote links work, etc. Which is frustrating given that I bought the damn thing OFF AMAZON, but I digress––… In one of the first chapters he outlines the trajectory of the Gothic romance into horror and detective fiction and ultimately into the Weird tale to bring us through the evolution of the literary form which culminated in Lovecraft’s work.

“Thus for Lovecraft, the stories of the age taught him that oblivion was the end result of the unwholesome pursuit of knowledge, a theme he would employ again and again.” (Loc 513)

This quote reminded me of something I often find myself discussing with people who come into my place of employment: while Lovecraft tells us explicitly in his language, via description and story structure, that the rational middle-to-upper class white men who make up his protagonists are of superior breeding, intelligence, and composure than any of the religious, superstitious, and non-white individuals they encounter… Protestant scientific rationalism never saves any of his protagonists from ignominious ends.

This tends to feed into my personal belief that one reason that Lovecraft endures as a writer despite his obvious failings as a human being, and especially despite the way those failings contaminate his fiction, is because this, like other parts of his œuvre, demonstrate that he was a better artist than he intended. His fiction is packed with epistemological ambiguities, the form and the fiction at odds with one another (and especially at odds with contemporary characterizations of both the fiction and the man… Perhaps something to follow up on at a later date). He tells us that the only way to achieve true knowledge and understanding is by following the path of rational scientific inquiry and to cast aside all superstition, but at the same time, he shows us that pursuing rational inquiry into these realms of the vast unknown can only result in madness and death.

I always return to The Dreams in the Witch House, the story which first arrested me with this realization. Because my biggest take away from the story was that the story’s protagonist, Walter Gilman, was an idiot. Throughout the entire story, Gilman is warned by “a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz” that he should abandon his somnambulant inquiries into the mysteries of the witch Keziah and his apartment on the top floor where the witch once lived, lest something terrible happen to him.

Spoiler alert:

Obviously, he doesn’t abandon his exploration of the spooky mathematics he’s involved in, and obviously he does not come to a good end, or he wouldn’t be appearing in this essay. It is important to note that, in defence of Lovecraft’s materialist worldview, neither does Mr. Mazurewicz. It would be blatant falsehood to state that religious or superstitious thinking provides any measure of true safety in the Lovecraft Mythos. But the kind of superstitious thinking which makes one wary of those places where the veil between the worlds is thinnest (if you will) is certainly worth heeding, even in a world populated with Old Ones and non-Euclidean geometries.

Side note: While I don’t think anyone is going to show up to start arguing with me, though I welcome people’s input, I am compelled to mention that I believe that in Dreams in the Witch House Gilman is to a certain degree bewitched (hah) and enthralled and therefore his decision to remain in Keziah’s apartment despite the presence of Brown Jenkins (truly the story’s most terrifying element) is not entirely his own. But that really only brings us to the edge of considering the quest for knowledge as a compulsion/enchantment in its own right.

But Lovecraft often seems to walk on the knife’s edge separating an annihilating Truth (accessible through rational scientific inquiry) and the safety of a recognizable supernatural reality (manageable through superstition and mystical belief). Being able to access a more accurate vision of reality does nothing to improve one’s ability to describe or comprehend it. His rational protagonists might have a “better idea” of what the Old Ones “really are” or better understand themselves or any number of things, but, as evidenced by their gibbering madness, are not at all better equipped to engage with that reality. Indeed, it often seems that the best way to “deal” with a Lovecraftian universe is to approach it with the armature of superstitious belief and a quasi-religious reverence. After all, several thousand years of religious worship clearly demonstrates that the human mind is equipped to handle belief in creatures with powers beyond anything they can imagine.

But Lovecraft often seems to walk on the knife’s edge separating an annihilating Truth (accessible through rational scientific inquiry) and the safety of a recognizable supernatural reality (manageable through superstition and mystical belief).

This approach to the supernatural, and the distance between rationality and superstition reminds me of the work of Lovecraft protégé and weird fiction writer Frank Belknap Long (now there was a man whose racism felt “of the time” by being just a light, temporal seasoning in the fiction, rather than a deeply rooted epistemological function of the fiction itself). I didn’t, on the whole, love Long’s fiction. As with many others, my primary motivation for reading his stuff were the two Lovecraftian stories, “The Hounds of Tindalos” and “The Space Eaters”. “Hounds” was frustrating because it felt like a brilliant premise executed to only a fraction of its full potential.

“The Space Eaters” by contrast is almost singularly brilliant… Up until the very end, where it lost me completely. I will actually refrain from speaking too much about the story itself, because it would be a genuine tragedy to ruin the experience for anyone who finds themself reading the story for the first time. I wish to discuss one element of the story which does not figure into the plot, but I noticed was characteristic of Long’s work, and I will, for better or worse, be discussing the mechanics of the end of the story which were such a disappointment to me.

One thing that struck me about Long’s work, over all, was that in contrast to Lovecraft’s characters who find themselves compelled to gaze into the abyss, Long’s protagonists compulsively look away. Where Lovecraft gives us a horror made of up of disjointed, impossible descriptions made all the more horrible by their almost coherence and comprehensibility, Long operates with a nearly cinematic “cut away” format for horrific reveals. In Long’s stories, we remain with the protagonist as he hears things, perhaps smells things, but he never ever looks, and, in “The Space Eaters”, one of our only hints as to the horrors that he is facing is given through the description of the face of someone who DID look while the protagonist looked away. It’s a fascinating structure, especially when compared to Lovecraft, because it proves to a certain degree how much the joke about Lovecraft’s hysteric “It’s was indescribable!” is in fact a gross mischaracterization of his descriptions. (Though he does overuse the word “cyclopean” it’s true.)

But in “The Space Eaters” Long’s protagonist eventually defeats the invaders by making the sign of the cross. It’s probably not the worst twist a story has ever had, but given the presence of a Lovecraft stand-in and the debates Long and Lovecraft had with one another about the merits of religion in general and Catholicism in particular, it does feel somewhat pointed. It also allows the protagonists to make it out alive in a way that few Lovecraftian heroes ever have. Indeed, Long’s fiction seems often to function specifically to shore up the argument that a healthy dose of superstitious thinking does a body good in a vast and largely unexplored reality. His protagonists tangle with the terrifyingly bizarre and incomprehensible, but then manage to move along consigning such things to the realms of fable and fiction, or secure in the knowledge that humanity’s spiritual and religious beliefs have developed alongside these intrusions into conventional reality for the specific purpose of managing and containing the experience of them.

Of course, modern fiction writers (at least, many of my favorites) like to explore the step beyond both Lovecraft and Long. They recognize the value of each viewpoint: that rational scientific inquiry, based in evidence, can yield a better understanding of reality; superstitious, or religious thinking has held a privileged place in human history and experience as a direct result of its capacity to explain the otherwise inexplicable and advise accordingly. But they don’t stop there. Most importantly, they recognize that life continues after these interruptions in conventional reality; it is often not a question of possibility, but of necessity to acquiesce to the new reality paradigm and continue living. It is possible to chart a path between Lovecraft’s Victorian “madness in the face of the irreconcilable” and Long’s “delivering unto the Outside what belongs to it”. We can and do reshape our realities and our understanding of the realities of others to interface with what was previously outside our direct comprehension.

Madness is a luxury not everyone can afford.

Yes, you have to use the same rules for everyone (Monsters vs Modernism)

Seriously, I’m both saddened and genuinely perturbed by people who feel capable and justified in casting out monsters, most especially Adam AKA Frankenstein’s Creature. While the Creature’s actions may be contemptible, his plea to be recognized as worthy of human compassion is so convincingly stated.

We must register, here, the contradiction at the heart of all debate on this issue: if we believe literature to be meaningful, we must recognize the power of language and both emotive and rational argumentation. Simultaneously, there are those who would deny the right of any intelligent entity to justify its own existence or advocate for its recognition as human. After all, it could all be a ploy. Each person must decide which of the two arguments they believe and then, one hopes, follow that logic through to its conclusion. Either words are powerful vectors of meaning and can convey an otherwise imperceptible truth regarding the inner qualities of a given entity’s experience of itself, OR any thing which advocates for itself must be treated with suspicion as a result of the possibility that it could be lying (people included).

I can tell you which option I prefer, but ultimately, nothing I say is likely to convince you, so I’ll leave it at that.

In the case of Adam, I am inclined to point to his reprehensible behavior as evidence of his humanity. He ultimately chooses to express himself in the manner with which he has been made most familiar by those around him; a destructive rage which seeks to balance the scales of justice which he sees as having been so cruelly stacked against him.

This particular rhetorical turn leads us to another point of insoluble contention.

Those who register a fundamental difference between Victor and his Creature are prone to the following logical proofs^[1]:

Victor = Man
Man ≠ God
∴ Victor ≠ God

Creature = Unnatural
Unnatural = Monstrous
∴ Creature = Monstrous

Simultaneously, they believe that these are static, immutable categories. Victor is not God, so he cannot create life absent of the usual process of human conception and gestation. The fact that he brought the Creature to life (loosely speaking) does not transform him into a god. Ergo, regardless of any action he takes, he remains a man.

Meanwhile, the Creature is burdened with its own immutable, non-human nature. There is nothing the Creature can do or say to alter its status as “monstrous”.

Given my personal thesis of the Creature’s fundamental right to compassion, I can choose to approach these arguments in a few different ways. First of all, this presupposes two very important ideas. It assumes that “Human” and “Monstrous” are mutually exclusive categories, yet it fails to follow one potential outcome of that very supposition. Namely:

Victor = Man
Man ≠ God
∴ Victor ≠ God

BUT if God is the only self-contained creative force, AND Victor created life w/o help, THEN – perhaps –
Victor ≠ Natural
Natural is oppositional to Unnatural
∴ Victor = Monstrous

Creature = Unnatural
Unnatural = Monstrous
∴ Creature = Monstrous

This particular line of reasoning can result in the possibility of being both Monstrous and Man without requiring that the terms being interchangeable.

We hit the end of the road when we realize that the question has become ‘What is the definition of “Man”?’

As we can see, it also requires us to deny the possibility that action has any transformative or generative capacity. By relying on the assumption that Victor is a priori excluded from the creation of life without a partner, then anything Victor creates which walks and talks and may show all the usual symptoms of “life” must not actually be alive. Hence the Adam’s designation as “unnatural” and his classification as “monstrous”.

The possible counter-arguments bifurcate once more.

On the one hand, I could produce historical evidence which shows that, prior to the Renaissance/Enlightenment and the development of modern human anatomy, the monstrous was inherently both natural and human. Forces beyond the traditional scope of man were clearly involved, resulting in “monstrous” births being viewed as auguries, portending good or ill. Nevertheless, they were born of human mothers, were seen as relating to human affairs and therefore their position as part of the human world is undeniable.

But an argument from authority, relying on history, is nevertheless an attempt to revise the fundamental assumptions of this argument, in a somewhat underhanded manner.

The other line of argument cuts right to the chase:

By this logic, our behavior is a direct result of our fundamental nature. Because our natures cannot change, our actions are confined to the limits of what our nature allows. If this is the case, then our nature and therefore our actions are the result of having been born one way or another, as this or as that.

If so, Adam is blameless in his monstrosity. His position outside humanity is beyond his control; yet he is supposed to submit to violence and denigration for an accident of birth.

We return to the question of original sin, innate evil, inherent and intrinsic qualities. This is the question which haunts moral philosophy, psychology, religion, and the judicial process:

Are we responsible for our own actions?
How must we live pursuant to or in the absence of that answer?

[1] Who wants to yell at me for using symbology cribbed from the two things I remember from high school freshman geometry? This is the rhetorical equivalent of an economist inserting a so-called “illustrative” graph which merely visually represents their argument without any meaningful relationship to actual observed phenomena. DON’T LET PEOPLE LIE TO YOU. (Especially not me.)

(For another take on this issue, read my previous post which takes a more metaphorical approach.)

desert | ƨiƨɒo

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