The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

EXCERPT

Chapter One - The Blood of an Android

To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

He was sure it was to be his last trip. The philosopher René Descartes had been summoned by Queen Christina of Sweden, who wanted to know his views on love, hatred, and the passions of the soul; but although he was happy to correspond with the Queen, Descartes was loath to become part of her court. He felt, he said, that “thoughts as well as waters” would freeze over in Sweden and, since that winter was particularly harsh, he believed he would not survive the season. He even feared, he wrote to a friend, “a shipwreck which will cost me my life.” But Christina’s whim was his command. Filled with foreboding, he packed his bags, taking all of his manuscripts with him.

He was travelling, he told his companions, with his young daughter Francine; but the sailors had never seen her, and, thinking this strange, they decided to seek her out one day, in the midst of a terrible storm. Everything was out of place; they could find neither the philosopher nor the girl. Overcome with curiosity, they crept into Descartes’s quarters. There was no one there, but on leaving the room, they stopped in front of a mysterious box. As soon as they had opened it, they jumped back in horror: inside the box was a doll-a living doll, they thought, which moved and behaved exactly like a human being. Descartes, it transpired, had constructed the android himself, out of pieces of metal and clockwork. It was indeed his progeny, but not the kind the sailors had imagined: Francine was a machine. When the ship’s captain was shown the moving marvel, he was convinced, in his shock, that it was some instrument of dark magic, responsible for the weather that had hampered their journey. On the captain’s orders, Descartes’s “daughter” was thrown overboard.

It’s hard to know if this story is true. Descartes did go to Sweden, and did, as he had feared, die there, six months later. He had, in fact, attempted to build some automata earlier in his life (one of his correspondents reported that Descartes had plans for “a dancing man, a flying pigeon, and a spaniel that chased a pheasant”), and he continued to be interested in mechanical toys. But the events on the ship read like a too-perfect fable-about science falling prey to the God-fearing crowd, about the threatening, uncanny power of machines, about the rational philosopher who has an almost superstitious relation to the product of his own mind: he names it, he calls it his daughter-and whether or not the story is made up of literal facts, it must, in a sense, be true to some metaphorical purpose: what is the use of telling it? (It has been told many times since Descartes’s death).

Descartes did have a daughter, and her name was Francine, but by the time this story is said to have taken place, Francine had been dead for many years. She was born in 1635, to a servant named Hélène Jans, whom Descartes never married. She lived with her father, at least some of the time, in the Netherlands, and he was planning to take her with him to France, when she died of scarlet fever, at the age of five. He told a friend that her death was the greatest sorrow of his life.

Seen from this angle, the Descartes of the story comes across, not as the reasoning philosopher, but as a fallible human being, distraught, nine years later, by the death of his child. Unable to mourn her, he constructs a simulacrum of the girl, gives it the power of motion, names it after her. If death was, as the following century liked to call it, “suspended animation,” then Descartes, in animating this doll, had defied mortality and resurrected his daughter. Perhaps he had even done something, symbolically, for his own lifespan. Some years earlier, when he had been focusing his work on medicine, Descartes had written that he thought he could live to be a hundred. Francine died shortly after that. The making of the doll might be seen as an attempt to counter the terrible dashing of his hopes of extended life; and it seems fitting then that the ageless clockwork figure should have been destroyed on the trip where he was eventually to meet his end. This would suggest that the sailors might have been right to fear the object, not in itself, but because of Descartes’s strange attachment to it.

Perhaps, however (since we cannot be sure of Descartes’s intentions), the story can only be understood as one put about by later generations, in which case what is interesting is the confusion of the culture behind it. The fable is a new configuration, built up out of anxiety. It describes, in the mind of the storyteller, and in that of the audience, an uncertainty about categories. What is the difference between a person and a machine? Where is the line between a child and a doll, between the animate and inanimate-in other words, between life and death? Will reason win out over randomness? Will God get the travellers to Sweden? What can we know for sure?

It seems barely surprising that these concerns should have been traced back to, or posthumously inserted into, the life of Descartes, who is often referred to as the father of modern philosophy. They are philosophical problems (philosophy, until the nineteenth century, included all branches of science: mechanics, astronomy, botany, chemistry, anatomy, and so on), but they were relevant to everyone. 

Descartes had laid the foundations for one of the central ideas of that period: the notion, taken up by anatomists and philosophers alike, that man is a machine, and can only be understood as such. You could say that androids were a crucial part of Descartes’s thought-his Treatise on Man,which was published after his death, is founded on a comparison between a human being and a hypothetical “statue or machine,” which operates like a clock or a hydraulic fountain. He had already put forward a “beast-machine” hypothesis, in which he argued that animals were machines, made up of mere matter, and that all of their faculties could be explained by mechanical means. The difference between beasts and men, he said, was that humans possessed a “rational soul,” whereas animals were incapable of reasoned thought (the cogito, “I think therefore I am,” sets out what separates us from matter). However, the idea that the soul was the source of human life was to become very contentious, and the atheist philosophers of the eighteenth century stretched Descartes’s beast-machine premise to include human beings as well. It was even suggested that Descartes had meant to say this all along, but had been too afraid: his hypothetical moving statue was not an analogy, a later thinker said, but plainly a description of ourselves. His masking rhetoric was just a clever “ruse,” “to get the theologians to swallow a poison.”

So the man most famous for the dictum “I think therefore I am” was as interested in the way bodies worked as he was in the function of the mind (whilst Descartes was conducting his own anatomical investigations, the local butcher would deliver animal corpses for him to dissect at home). Neither the idea that men are machines, nor, conversely, the machines that were constructed to look like men, can be properly understood without him.

Jaquet-Droz’s writing automaton in Neuchâtel is known to have scrawled, on some occasions, the words “I think therefore I am.” At other times, it has written a more ironic tribute: “I do not think . . . do I therefore not exist?” It’s a perfect riddle, of the kind many automata conjure up. The writer, a mere machine, is able to declare that it cannot think. Clearly, however, it does exist: and if it is able to communicate the fact that it cannot think, is it possible that it can think after all? Might the machine be lying? What is the difference between the automaton that writes “I do not think” and a person who, having lost the power of speech, is obliged to write that sentiment or its opposite on paper?

In this context, what the fable about the ship finally represents is the throwing overboard of one of Descartes’s great contributions to philosophy, anatomy, and mechanics. Science was cast out to sea.

So, I went to my GP with my worries about my knee replacement surgery. He was very nice, warm and informative, saying that nine out of ten people who have this surgery recapture a better quality of life. He also said that it probably wouldn’t matter that I already have Fibromyalgia. And suggested that I do some daily walking to build up stamina.

I am now determined to think as positively as possible about the upcoming surgery, telling myself that I will never be, no matter what happens, an invalid in a wheel chair. I will try very hard to at least get back to the state I’m in right now. And yes, I am now walking every day, or rather, limping. And as I walk/limp I am saying to myself “I am getting stronger”. (At least until I collapse at a coffee shop to recover.)

Looked at a copy of this new best seller called ‘The Secret’ the other day at a nearby bookstore. As far as I can see, the entire book is a series of quotations from various people other than the author, all strung together with a blank space between each quote. Great way to write a book; the only originality seems to be to arrange the quotations in some kind of order. Of course, I may be wrong: she may simply have written the book as a member of a committee of self-help types. Anyway, the book comes with accompanying testimonials of how people who adopted its ‘message’ noticed a difference immediately, many of them experiencing better health or wealth. Anyway, one of its messages is that if you wonder why you’re not rich, it’s because you haven’t been thinking positively enough about making wealth come your way. Worse, it suggests that if you aren’t rich at present, it’s your own fault.

I can see and believe in the power of positive thinking; I know that being an optimist can make one’s life better, for example. And my experience years ago while giving birth painlessly is, I always have felt, proof that I believed firmly that my Lamaze breathing would make my labor easier, so it did. But can positive thinking, or rather, thinking about getting rich, really cause you to get rich? Not without lots of effort in the form of actions, I would think. If you start acting in ways that could bring money your way, while thinking in a focused way about that goal, then perhaps you might get more money. But this book almost suggests that your positive brain waves will go out into the world and actually contact money and bring it back to you.

On the other hand, believing that you will get more good health might just work. The power of suggestion is at work there, and that must tap the so called ‘placebo’ effect, which I believe is also responsible for many miracles. So, I am going to program myself into positive thinking regarding my surgery and my rehab afterwards, and see if it works. I have nothing to lose, really.

NATURAL LAW

There is a law that Spring at last must come;

That after months with toes and fingers numb,

You will awake one sunny April day

To see the snow has melted, and the gray

Dead grass is once more turning green.

It does not matter if the Winter lasts

Long into March, if snow keeps falling fast.

Eventually the angle of the sun

Will legislate such stuff as snow is done

And bring about a much more vernal scene.

Some folk believe in God, but as for me,

My faith is tested by the misery

Late winter, with its blizzard breath can bring

In vanquishing each tiny hope of Spring.

I put my faith in April and its green.

It never yet has failed me, unlike God.

It wakens up the hard-packed, icy sod

Brings out the buds and blossoms on the trees,

Turns howling winds into a gentle breeze,

Grows blades of grass where once the snow had been.

It is dependable, like night and day,

A law that keeps my soul from turning gray

That keeps the red sap running in my veins

A solace in the midst of mortal pains,

The resurrection of the earthly green.

Here’s an interesting poem, which I only partially ‘get’. It seems to be about the cleansing effect of March winds–almost as good as a car wash–but also suggests that the cleansing involves showing all the dirt and garbage that life collects. This is both scary and thrilling, it seems, but also necessary. But why repeat “And green ash”? An allusion to Ash Wednesday, which is near to March 21? Because of the contrast between ‘ash’ as in ‘grey’ and ‘fire residue’ and ‘green’ for new life? Any ideas?

FIRST DAY OF SPRING by Ann Hudson, from “The Armillary Sphere”

It’s a wild March morning in Chicago, the wind

dragging its nets through the streets.

Trawling for its usual and plentiful treasures:

crushed styrofoam cups, torn newspapers,

lost gloves, a blizzard of fast food napkins.

I take my eight-year-old Toyota

through the car wash. Idling in neutral,

I ease past the powerful, shaggy brushes,

the nozzles spraying limp foam onto the hood,

and remember the sick excitement I felt

when my father took my sisters and me through,

all the windows of our ‘67 baby blue Valiant

tightly cranked, the antenna pushed into its sleeve,

our doors locked against who-knows-what,

the three of us with our identical haircuts

buckled into the back seat, our identical shoes

drumming the vinyl. I was sure

those huge blue brushes would crash

right through the windshield and pin us to our seats.

At eight, a child sure of impending danger this

was about all the thrill I could handle.

I pull out of the car wash into the tangle

of traffic, past the bars that open at nine in the morning

and stay open, past the disheveled and pacing junkies,

past the crumbling theater draped in shadow and disrepair,

and make slow headway against the wind

that gathers the stray grocery bags all over the city,

whipping them against the masts

of budding hawthorns, silver maples,

bald cypress, green ash, green ash.

These nights, I lie awake for hours worrying about my knee replacement surgery at the end of April. There’s really no one who can advise me. And I have reason to worry. I hate to be self-pitying, but I have to air my worries somewhere, so here goes:

Firstly, I worry about the surgery itself. Patients usually are simply given an epidural, but remain conscious. I don’t want to lie there, listening while doctors drill and saw my knee, thank you very much, and would rather be out like a light, awakening later to discover the job was over and I had a new knee. The docs might not allow that, however; since I’m an asthmatic, they may worry about my breathing while I’m under. However, I suppose I can bear that, if I have to. And I’m lucky I live in Canada, where the operation will be free, not $16,000, as it would be in the States if I didn’t have an HMO.

Secondly, I worry about the post-operative period. I’ll be at the Catherine Booth Hospital for recuperation, which is apparently very nice and also will be free, of course. But I worry about things like infection, which is readily available, it seems, in hospitals these days. Apparently you are so open to infection after surgery that if you’re having your teeth filled you have to be given antibiotics to keep any infection from traveling through your system to your knee! An English teacher I know who had both his knees replaced last year had one knee turn out well, but the other got infected and had to be re-opened and drained.( I even heard a rumor that he had contracted flesh-eating disease, but that can’t be right, can it?)

I worry about the pain afterwards. I know they now give you something to allow you to self-administer pain killers, but the whole idea still worries me. Joanie, my sister in law, had terrible pain after her knee replacement. Of course, I have to keep telling myself that her case was atypical, that she apparently had some kind of adverse reaction to surgery that made her knee swell more than usual and remain tight, swollen, red, and very painful all the time. Hopefully my knee won’t be like that. Besides, she wasn’t at the hospital, but at home, so as to be able to tend to her pets, and therefore wasn’t available for the docs to medicate. Surely my situation will be better. (Or so I tell myself.)

I also have petty worries about this period. Will the hospitals let me have all my pillows, without which I can’t sleep? Can I wear an ordinary nightgown from home, or will I be in one of those ridiculous hospital gowns? Will I be in a room with a patient who snores all the time , so that I can’t sleep? And how embarrassing to have to use a bed pan! And have someone give me sponge baths! I’m embarrassed enough about my lost figure without strangers seeing it–even strangers who are nurses.

Returning home also worries me. John will be marking English Exit Essays from mid-May to June 5, so I’ll be alone all day from 8-4, upstairs (since we only have a toilet upstairs). However, he can fix me a sandwich before he goes, and I can have a kettle with me upstairs, where I can keep occupied with the computer, the TV and my books. But using the toilet will be awkward: I’ll have to get a raised thing to make the seat higher. And I won’t be able to shower, since I’ll have to keep the wound dry, so that means sponge baths while balancing on one foot. Will I still be in pain? Will they give me sufficient meds for this period? How will I get to my physiotherapist without a car? By taxi, I guess.

Still, my biggest worry is that my body will fail me. I have no stamina at all these days. I get exhausted from making dinner or from simply sitting on Devon’s bed with an unsupported back while reading to her for 20 minutes before she goes to sleep. I can’t walk very far, even with a cane. I’m overweight, really overweight, not just a bit. And worst of all, I have fibromyalgia, which means that even before having an operation, the skin at my ankles, where there’s no fat, hurts to the touch. So does the rest of my body. My feet are misshapen from arthritis, and painful. I routinely take two Tylenol every 5 hours for these reasons. Just imagine what a strain the operation will have on my already weak body! I may be able to deal with all the embarrassments, annoyances, pains, etcetera because I have a strong will, but what if my body just lacks the strength to deal with surgery?

At least now I can hobble around with a cane, even if I am in pain. Who knows what I’ll be able to do after the operation. I may be a helpless invalid for the rest of my life. And yet, my knee can only get worse if I don’t have the surgery, so that even hobbling around may become eventually impossible. And so I lie awake at night, in pain, worrying….

Here’s what my sources, found through Google, have to say about her (with comments by me in parentheses):

“The Caillagh ny Groamagh (“Gloomy Old Woman”, also called the Caillagh ny Gueshag, “Old Woman of the Spells”) of the Isle of Man is a winter and storm spirit whose actions on the 1st of February are said to foretell the year’s weather–if it is a nice day, She will come out into the sun, which brings bad luck for the year.” (This is the pagan, European origin of the idea that February 1 is celebrated by waiting for a groundhog to emerge and see his shadow –because it’s a sunny day, of course– and bring on a longer winter.) To continue:

” The Cailleach Uragaig, of the Isle of Colonsay in Scotland, is also a winter spirit who holds a young woman captive, away from her lover.” ( This is obviously the origin of the story of “Rapunzel”) “The theme of winter holding spring captive is also seen in the tale that the Cailleach imprisons the beautiful young goddess Bride inside of a mountain over the winter. At Bride’s release, spring comes to the world.” (It’s also like Persephone being held captive by Hades in the Underworld.)

The Cailleach Bheur (“genteel old lady”) of Scotland is a blue-faced hag of winter, who ages in reverse–from old and ugly (symbolizing winter) to young and lovely (spring). The Cailleach Bhéirre of Ireland represents sovereignty over the land and is ancestress of many peoples. Like Dame Ragnell of the Arthurian legends, She appears to the hero as an hideous old woman seeking love; if She gets it, She becomes a beautiful young woman. In legends dating from Christian times, She is sometimes said to be a nun, perhaps linked to the meaning of Her name, which can mean ‘veiled woman”.

And so we see the transformation of myth into fairy tale and romance.

I have read many of Kay’s novels, starting with “The Lions of Al-Rassan”, which someone recommended in a book club of which I was a member some years ago. I quite liked Kay’s take on history, which with him means ‘history-with-a-difference’. He renames a geographical area and era, then changes any known names in order to have a kind of parallel universe–calling Byzantium ‘Sarantium’, in ‘Sailing to Sarantium’, for example–so as to be able to take artistic license with the characters and facts in history for novelistic reasons. He gives the most realistic presentation possible, then finally adds a layer of magic or mysticism— like the talking bronze birds in that book and the giant mystical bison that appears in the field near the forest, steaming and stinking and full of power, demanding a sacrificial victim of the travelers it has accosted.

So, I went on to read the books in the ‘Sarantine Mosaic’ series, then ‘A Song for Arbonne’ and finally, fairly recently, ‘Last Light of the Sun’. Somewhere in there, I tried, then put down ‘The Summer Tree’ trilogy because it was too filled with Dungeon and Dragon-type characters like dwarfs, priestesses, warriors, spirits, etcetera, and I didn’t really care for any of the people; it was his first series, and I personally don’t think he had yet found his proper style and subject.

I have just finished reading his latest work, ‘Ysabel’, and find it very disappointing. And here I must warn of ’spoilers’ : the book is, unbeknownst to the reader, a kind of sequel to The Summer Tree books. Not that I would have known that if I hadn’t read some reviews of the book, one of which gave a spoiler that at least gave me a clue to what was going on in this book. Someone who hasn’t read his first trilogy will be quite lost at times here, for there are references to past deeds and adventures on the part of some of the characters that are never fully explained, although no doubt they will be meaningful to someone familiar with that series.

For the rest of us, they are meaningless. So we wonder, throughout the book, why Kim Ford, aunt of the protagonist, 15 year old Ned, had her hair go white almost overnight long ago? Why is she so estranged from her sister, Ned’s mother? How is it she can not only speak Gaelic, but speak it with authority to apparently mythological characters? Why does she seem to have powers and knowledge that go beyond simply the second sight she mentions as being in her family through her Welsh grandmother? And what about her husband, Dave Martyniac, who seems to be channeling a warrior from some ancient time and can battle wolves when he encounters them in the hills of Provence, yet is also just a middle aged man? Where did he get his powers, and why?

Couldn’t Kay at least have written a family discussion into the book in which Ned’s family told him that years ago, when they were students, they had been part of an amazing adventure into a parallel Celtic world where Dave was a warrior and Kim a priestess? As it is, we wait for an explanation that never comes. Most readers, I think, will conclude that his aunt and uncle must be Wiccans, but will still wonder why there’s no revelation near the end of the book about how they became that way. And will never guess that they are characters from another series by the same author.

Kay, perhaps because he has two teenaged sons who helped with the research on this book as they traveled through southern France, manages to depict Ned very well, giving him enough intelligence, knowledge and wit to make him an interesting protagonist, even for an adult reader, despite the fact that he is in high school back in Montreal, where he hails from. In this way, he very much resembles Will in the ‘Dark is Rising’ series, which is also accessible for both adult and YA readers. Despite being part of the world of cell phones, iPods and Google, Ned quickly acts on newly-discovered ESP of his own when faced with an eternal triangle, two men in love with a woman named Ysabel, who have somehow gained immortality and have been reborn again and again over 2,500 years in order to re-enact their rivalry and love. (Come to think of it, the book also resembles a book whose name I forget, but which deals with some teenagers getting caught up in and re-enacting the story of Blodewedd the Flower Goddess. Does anyone know which book I mean?)

The love story at the heart of this novel is a bit unclear, however, in its origins. I would have loved it if, at a certain point in the story, Ned had simply Googled “Marseilles History’, as I just did, and explained to everyone that, according to someone named Pytheas the Greek (an explorer who wrote of his travels around the known and unknown world long before the Roman era), there was once an incident where a Greek named Protis, after meeting the native Celts of what is now called southern France, attended a special ritual where the chief’s daughter presented him with a goblet of water from a sacred spring to indicate that she had chosen him to be her husband (and recipient, with that marriage, of a dowry consisting of most of the land around Marseilles.) Knowing that would have anchored the story a bit, made it more historical. As it is, we think this is something Kay has invented, rather than knowing that it is part of the myth of southern France.

But no. We never find out why these people–a Celtic man, a Celtic woman and a Roman– of all those who have lived and died there in southern France’s history, have gained immortality and are still capable of performing an ancient ritual over and over again throughout the centuries. And who is Ysabel, anyway? Just an amazing Celtic woman of the past–the one who chose the stranger for her husband– who has somehow managed to beat death? Or is she the incarnation of a goddess?

The little band consisting of Ned, his relatives, some of their friends, and his new friend Kate, are very likable and their attempts to rescue one of their member who has been “abducted” by these reincarnated spirits/historical people are gripping and interesting. I just miss the usual Guy Gavriel Kay touch, which has, in the past, given us more background history. And I really do wish he had indicated somewhere–maybe in a note at the start of the book–that readers of his Summer Tree series would be pleased to note some familiar friends.

This is pretty much how I feel today, March 9, when I’m sick of winter and spring seems very far away.

Poem: “February” by Margaret Atwood, from Morning in the Burned House. © Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

February

Winter. Time to eat fat

and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,

a black fur sausage with yellow

Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries

to get onto my head. It’s his

way of telling whether or not I’m dead.

If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am

He’ll think of something. He settles

on my chest, breathing his breath

of burped-up meat and musty sofas,

purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,

not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,

declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,

which are what will finish us off

in the long run. Some cat owners around here

should snip a few testicles. If we wise

hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,

or eat our young, like sharks.

But it’s love that does us in. Over and over

Again, He shoots, he scores! and famine

crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing

eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits

thirty below, and the pollution pours

out of our chimneys to keep us warm.

February, month of despair,

with a skewered heart in the centre.

I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries

with a splash of vinegar.

Cat, enough of your greedy whining

and your small pink bumhole.

Off my face! You’re the life principle,

more or less, so get going

on a little optimism around here.

Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Neil Gaiman’s blog refers his readers to an article where Russian fishermen recently caught a squeaking creature that looked like an alien and squeaked at them. They proceeded to eat it. Yes, eat it. (They say it was the best food they’d ever had.)

Do they always eat what they catch, I wonder, even if it turns out to be an old boot? Don’t they take lunch bags to work like the rest of us??? Are they at sea for so many days that there’s no chance of ducking into the nearest Perogy Hut on their way home from work as a better dinner option???

Most of all, weren’t they the least bit curious as to what this strange thing with a face was that was squeaking at them???

Didn’t keeping it alive and taking it to scientists to have it analyzed occur to them.

So ends the possible first attempt to communicate with extra-terrestrials–or sea creatures along the line of mermen, etcetera.

http://english.pravda.ru/science/mysteries/07-02-2007/87167-alien_monster-0

Parents

What it must be like to be an angel

or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.

The last time we go to bed good,

they are there, lying about darkness.

They dandle us once too often,

these friends who become our enemies.

Suddenly one day, their juniors

are as old as we yearn to be.

They get wrinkles where it is better

smooth, odd coughs, and smells.

It is grotesque how they go on

loving us, we go on loving them.

The effrontery, barely imaginable,

of having caused us. And of how.

Their lives: surely

we can do better than that.

This goes on for a long time. Everything

they do is wrong, and the worst thing,

they all do it, is to die,

taking with them the last explanation,

how we came out of the wet sea

or wherever they got us from,

taking the last link

of that chain with them.

Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling,

to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren.