Things You People Wouldn't Believe

Most of this last month, I've stayed away from blogging.  Not because I don't enjoy it, or because it's not a vital part of a writer's discipline.

But because, again this year, I'd committed to National Novel Writing Month.  I keep a stack of stories that are pressing me to be told, and now, I've got one less.  Sunday, late in the evening, the next manuscript sat finished, at sixty-two thousand words and change.  A perfectly novelly-length novel, albeit in raw and unedited form.  

From the Water, I'm calling it for now, a tale of the rise of artificial intelligence from the chaos of organic life.  It evokes and sounds off of a range of themes from faith and culture, intentionally evoking the Exodus story, and reflecting on the miracle of organized sentience in the chaos of being.

That, and at a certain point, it became a good rip-snortin' yarn, one I was eager to read even as I wrote it.

It's fun, getting it done.   But getting it done meant not doing other things.  If you're going to write a novel in a month, you've got to prioritize and make it your specific goal.  That means other stuff gets set aside.

Blogging was one of those necessary things to set aside, but man, was it hard not to write sometimes this month.  If you process information by writing it out, there was plenty to process this month.  Lord have mercy, has it been a mess out there.

What's peculiar, though, is the degree to which my noveling has played off of the realities I've been studiously not writing about.

Like, say, the novel's exploration of the nature of memory and subjectivity.

One of the distinctives of a machine intelligence would be the capacity to share.  Not just "describe."  Not just "tell about," using the symbols and forms of language.  But to completely share a state of mind.  "Here," it could say.  "Here is exactly how I perceived and processed that particular moment in time.  Here is why I responded as I did.  Here I am, in my completeness."

Human beings don't do this very well.

We try, we do.  And sometimes, by the grace of God, we succeed.

But more often than not, we fail.  We are so set in ourselves and in our ideological frameworks that we willfully blind ourselves to the other.  We do not see them in their complexity.  We refuse to do so.  Instead, we do the easier thing.  We choose to fashion a crude caricature of their motivations, one that exists to serve our interests.  We selectively view their actions, picking and choosing those that serve our desire for demonization or hagiography.  We project into that clumsy simulation our needs, our angers, our fears, our pre-judgement.

That gives us control, or at least the illusion thereof.

But it also divorces us from reality and the deep compassion of the Creator.  It enslaves us to our own self-perpetuating brokenness.

Humans: It's Not About Us

It was the last night of summer, and we needed to mark it somehow.

So I and the wife and the lads went to see one of the big blockbuster films that we'd not quite gotten around to seeing over the course of our busy summer.  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes had gotten decent reviews, and I'd enjoyed the first one, so I found it playing at a nearby twenty-two-plex that I wasn't even aware existed.  Ah, the joys of living in a huge metro area.  We piled into the car, and off we went.

We got a large refillable popcorn and one large refillable soda between the four of us, and with our bucket of carbs and fizzy fluid, we settled in for the last gasp of summer.

The film itself was solid, and a better bit of cinema than its predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  I found it completely enjoyable, and a good bit of storytelling.  It wasn't perfect, as it got a tick overblown and overlong at times.

Most notably, it shared the primary "flaw" of the first film in the series:  The humans just weren't very interesting.

It wasn't as noticeable as the first film, where the performances by the human characters were flat and formulaic.  There, we were stuck with James Franco sort of phoning it in, and...what...the guy who played Draco Malfoy?  I can't remember much else.

What you did remember were the apes, who were--despite being CG--compelling, emotionally affecting, and far more "human" than the humans.

That was also true in the second film.  The human actors did a better job, a solid, creditable job, but this wasn't their story.  It was the story of Caesar and Koba, of Blue Eyes and Ash and Maurice.  Sure, there was good and evil, trust and betrayal, justice and the dark selfishness of power.

Homo sapiens sapiens wasn't the focus of the tale.  We weren't the point.

Which, I think, is generally true of creation.

Oh, we can be part of the purpose of all sentient life.  We can participate in it.  We can choose to be aware, and connected, and creative, and kind.  We can seek knowledge, and justice, and then transcend justice with grace.

Or we can choose not to, as we do, more often than not.

But what we should never do, not ever, is imagine that we're as important as we think we are.

Agent Black

Though I have the same deep hardwired love of cars as most Amurrican males, I've always viewed our car-centric transportation system as a bit ..off. That comes, I suppose, from having to spend so much time in it. Yeah, I know, there are distractions for when we drive. I should be yammering away on my cell or texting or listening to people scream at each other on talk radio.

But more often than not, I pay attention to where I am, and what I'm doing. I look out across an expanse of tarmac and idling steel and flesh stretching to the horizon, and I think...this isn't progress. Progress should feel...graceful. Progress should be...moving. As our society has grown around the easy availability of petroleum, cities and towns and communities built on a human scale have vanished. The burbs have flourished and spread like a fungus on the inside of an unwashed thigh.

Oil has meant growth, without question. It has driven massive expansions in infrastructure, and underlies all modern commerce and industrial agriculture. It is the engine that made the explosive human population growth of the 20th century possible.

But I wonder: is it the growth that kills?

Agent Orange is my favorite metaphor for growth-unto-death. That narsty substance, in the event that you don't know your 20th century history, was a herbicide sprayed onto the forests of Vietnam by fleets of American planes. To kill Viet Cong, we had to deprive them of cover...so we killed their jungles. Agent Orange was the plant toxin we used, and it works in a very interesting way.

It simulates a plant growth hormone, and essentially causes most broadleaf plants to go into a period of explosive and unsustainable fecundity. After spraying, leaves would grow huge. Fruit would be immense, distended, mealy and inedible. A jungle poisoned by Agent Orange would, for a short while, be an alien wonderland of insane, outrageous production...and then, having exhausted itself, the jungle would die.

For 100 years, we've consumed the black blood of ancient dragons, and from that easy but finite energy have grown explosively. But the age of oil is ending. As I look out across what human society has become, I do now and again wonder.

Are fossil fuels our Agent Black?