Kip Manley's Blog, page 38
April 17, 2018
Things to keep in mind (The secret of the mode)
Fantasy is reality. Aristotle says that music is the most realistic of the arts because it represents the movements of the soul directly. Surely the mode of fantasy (which includes many genres and effects) is the only way in which some realities can be treated.
I grew up in United States in the 1950s, in a world in which fantasy was supposed to be the opposite of reality. “Rational,” “mature” people were concerned only with a narrowly defined “reality” and only the “immature” or the “neurotic” (all-purpose put-downs) had any truck with fantasy, which was then considered to be wishful thinking, escapism, and other bad things, attractive only to the weak and damaged. Only Communists, feminists, homosexuals and other deviants were unsatisfied with Things As They Were at the time and Heaven help you if you were one of those.
I took to fantasy like a duckling to water. Unfortunately for me, there was nobody around then to tell me that fantasy was the most realistic of arts, expressing as it does the contents of the human soul directly.
April 9, 2018
Things to keep in mind (The secret of how to write)
What? You think these rules are harsh and arbitrary? These are the very Laws of Fiction! Writing works if and only if you follow these edicts to the letter. This is a scientifically proven factoid. These are epistemic, alethic, deontic and boulomaic absolutes. Not just truths, but Troths. There is no questioning them. There is no wiggle room. Because they are writ into the very fabric of reality—not the fabric of society, which is wrought of socionormative contingencies and subjectivities, and an ugly plaid, not even a nice subtle tartan, but a hideous lurid golf plaid, and therefore deserves to be destroyed… no, not the fabric of society, but the very fabric of the spacetime continuum itself. These are How Writing Works.
You doubt me? Very well then. Let me set forth the wisdom of the rules, that you may weep in awe at their correctitude, and know in your hearts that lest you follow them to the letter you will fail.
March 30, 2018
Things to keep in mind (The secret of sensawunda)
I want to be surprised by science fiction. Always. I want to be surprised by everything I read, but science fiction and fantasy more than most kinds of fiction seem to offer such a promise, only to all too often snatch it away at the last moment. Having acknowledged that need, that desire, for metaphor, the sense of wonder, even the barest nod to the sublime, this seems to provide a starting point for how I might write about science fiction and fantasy literature in the future.
March 22, 2018
Things to keep in mind (The secret of the visible world)
Decorating, covering, uncovering or otherwise altering the human form in accordance with social notions of everyday propriety or sacred dress, beauty or solemnity, status or changes in status, or on occasion of the violation and inversion of such notions, seems to have been a concern of every human society of which we have knowledge. This objectively universal fact is associated with another of a more subjective nature—that the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well. As these two entities are quite different, and as cultures differ widely in the ways they define both, the relation between them is highly problematic. The problems involved, however, are ones that all societies must solve in one way or another, because upon the solution must rest a society’s ways of “socialising” individuals, that is, of integrating them into the societies to which they belong, not only as children but throughout their lives. The surface of the body, as the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual; becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted, and bodily adornment (in all its culturally multifarious forms, from body-painting to clothing and from feather head-dresses to cosmetics) becomes the language through which it is expressed.
March 14, 2018
Things to keep in mind (The secret of the luck of Fourierism)
The sexual acts that Delany describes also involve, and create, forms of affiliation between people. These affiliations are grounded in bodily pleasures, in the pleasures of sharing, and in the multiple ways that people can find mutually enabling forms of contact. It’s a vision of both bodily desire, and human sympathy or being-together, that seems to me in an odd way more reminiscent of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier than it is of Freud. Each person’s particular twists of desire are what enlivens him or her, without having to be “accounted for,” or matched to any norms—so that they are entirely singular and autonomous to but also with the open, outward-looking potentiality of creating affinities with other people who have similar and/or complementary desires (someone who likes to drink piss meets someone who likes to piss in other people’s mouths; and in turn they meet someone else who likes to watch this…). With all these singularities of desire, nobody is ever drearily “the same” as anybody else; but also, with the widening circles of these singularities, everyone is likely to find at least some other people with whom to share at least something that moves, excites, or arouses them. It is in the midst of such continual fluctuating action that Eric and Shit, and also some of the other couples or threesomes (or more-than-threesomes) that we meet in the course of the novel must negotiate, both their primary emotional relationships with one another, and their sexual-emotional engagements, of various longer or shorter durations, with other people as well.
March 6, 2018
Things to keep in mind (The secret of living later)
But seen from the future it anticipates, sci-fi will inevitably appear as primitive myth. For like all myth, it hangs back from thinking the totality of what it projects – which is to say, total transcendence in the here and now (whose reality will, for the first time ever, make myth itself a thing of the past).
The unthinkable reality of that transcendence is violence. The only way transcendence can remain transcendence once it becomes real (free of myth) is by incorporating within itself a capacity for violent destruction without limit (which for the theological era was equivalent to absolute evil) considered as no more than a dimension of the everyday. The “human” condition of possibility for this is the ability of human subjects to live on, beyond physical destruction. But its implications for human subjectivity remain unexplored. Though the sci-fi hero is always already dead, living later, essentially a late being seen from our present standpoint, sci-fi narratives are spoken by and to a subject for whom that mode of existence remains totally unthinkable.
In sci-fi the violence of transcendence is deflected so that the world and only the world (which includes the bodily reality of the individuals who inhabit it) is exposed to transcendence as violence. Sci-fi is thus essentially nihilistic. It frees the reality of transcendence from the demonization by theology, but merely invites us to contemplate it in the form of endless technological apocalypse.
February 26, 2018
Things to keep in mind (The secret of eros)
The feminine phantasm can then take entire possession of the pneumatic system of the lover, producing—unless desire finds its natural outlet—somatic disturbances of a quite vexing sort. Called ishq, this syndrom of love is described by Avicenna, whose Liber canonis was the manual of medicine in use in the early Christian Middle Ages. But previously, Constantine the African had spoken of it in his translation of the Liber regius of ‘Ali ibn al-‘Abbas al-Majusi, called Haly Abbas. After Constantine, the semiology of the pathological Eros is described by Arnaldus of Villanova and by Vincent of Beauvais, who classify it among the varieties of melancholia.
The name of the syndrome is amor hereos or, Latinized, heroycus, as its etymology is still in doubt: it might be derived from the Greek erōs, corrupted herōs (love), or directly from herōs (hero), for heroes represented, according to ancient tradition, evil ærial influences, similar to devils.
