Emotional Entity and the Lady in White

I slide my hand into the Emotional Entity as if to verify that it is real. There is a brief jabbing sensation just below my lower left rib. The Emotional Entity has a rich texture, a rusty brown colour, and I let my hand slide in and probe it at will. It is of a paradoxical substance, watery when I move, but more substantial, like a blanket, when I probe and feel. I have no idea where it leads to, or what it is connected to, but it has been here for days.

A tingling sensation arises gradually in my hand. Then it is in both hands, and as if in answer to a conductor's call, the glands throughout my body start to open and tingle in a surging symphony.

The Lady in Light appears. I can never tell whether she is standing in a clearing, or next to a river, perhaps it is the sea: the light approaches her like waves rolling in from the sea. I never see her face, which is turned away from me, and which I am not at all sure about. I do not know why she appears to me. Everything is light, billowing white and yellow, so bright that I almost have to shield my sight. Almost.

Nothing ever really changes either. The rippling waves of light are always there, an endless energy. And she stands there, protected from me, unknown to me really, the fringes of her dark hair partly covered by a cap, lifting and sometimes whipping in the wind. That is how I know she is outside, because of the wind. Or is it the power of the waves that generates the movement in the air? Again, I am not sure. Her coat is pulled tightly around her, and draping over it, held against her body, is a kind of shawl being tugged by the wind. Even when it feels as if I am moving, she remains at the same angle from me, I never get to see her face.

Sometimes when I look at her for long enough I start noticing that the waves do not come closer. They are more like clouds of vapour or steam that expend themselves. She guides them imperceptibly, shaping them into patterns. Despite their size they evolve quickly and without heaviness, before dissipating.

When she disappears again, like now, I am always surprised. The memory remains, and the sensation, and the light on my face.

The Emotional Entity has gone as well. Or at least, it has changed. But I think it is gone. When I move my hand the air around it is thin, thinner than water, and colourless like water. Clear and fresh, like the air at the top of a mountain.

Lilith's Brood (a.k.a. Xenogenesis) by Octavia E. Butler

Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood (formerly Xenogenesis) is a sophisticated novel featuring human relations re-imagined after a catastrophic war. This short analysis is not intended to give the game away by revealing all the plot details, but rather to serve as a compass for the conceptual complexities the reader is likely to encounter.

Let me begin by saying what the novel is not: Xenogenesis is not a scientific treatise of the future. We are given subjective views from the viewpoints of the main characters and we are often bewildered and confused about the nature of this reality, just like the main characters. It is also neither a utopia nor a dystopia. It is not a soap opera. It does not defend mainstream values. It is not comfortable.

Did you follow that? It is not comfortable.

Now that that is out of the way, we can focus on the main guiding forces in this fabulous but never easily digested novel.

What if someone offered you a highly desirable life beyond your imagination: promises of riches and personal achievement beyond your dreams. What if this offer came at the price of an exchange in which you have to offer up yourself in daily sacrifice in a kind of Faustian bargain? Would you do it? No really, would you?

Now what if this offer applies to things you did not necessarily want, nor dreamed of, but that you know is actually good for you. It's like an ideal world, but not in the personal sense: in other words it is something you have to learn to appreciate, and eventually can. Like committing yourself to a religion you know for a fact to be true, or to a partner you know to be unfailingly loyal and satisfying. But a commitment that at the same time would come at the cost of other pleasures and freedoms.

So what if this - admittedly good - situation, also comes at the cost of your soul, your essence - not to be given up, but to be controlled by another, perhaps owned by another. And what if - yes, that's another if - in this process, you are also betraying everyone you ever knew and ever held dear. Committing yourself to something that would forever render you despised or hated in the hearts of those you used to call your own.

And yet what if, if you do not go through with it, if you do not choose this good thing, you and all your children may possibly forever be doomed. What would you do? Would you choose it? Or would you risk your future in favour of a reasonable, admirable personal pride and dignity?

What if ... what if ..
What if you have to choose?

Welcome to the world of Lilith's Brood, where people are placed in situations where the only choices are severe, and there are no comfortable alternatives. Where moral dilemmas and severe existential challenges have to be faced. Where you are between a rock and a hard place.

Meet Lilith, whose world is turned upside down when she realises she has been "rescued" by the Oankali (an alien race) after humans nearly wiped themselves out in endless wars, and the "benevolent" Oankali managed to pick up a few remaining survivors who are now their new trading partners: genetic trading partners, that is; and the Oankali are so powerful, they don't really have to ask ...

But all the same, they are giving her a choice: Lilith is offered a chance to pioneer humans' new life. Understandably, she'd rather not. But unlike the Faustian devil, the Oankali are both Satan and God, both the seducers and the benevolent givers and protectors. They also need them (a truly interpersonal axis), the Oankali are dependent on the bargain. It is a world beyond good and evil, the choices are tough, and mediating and negotiating relationships between humans and Oankali is no mean feat.

Without giving any more away (as this is not an exhaustive analysis of the novel) suffice it to say that the novel offers wonderful scope for interpretation, and I hope that by offering a glimpse into its structural mechanism I have helped the reader on her way to unravelling the story's interesting evolution.

PS.

Octavia E. Butler was a multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner, and receiver of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant. She passed away suddenly in 2006.

Manuel DeLanda - Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

My newfound enthusiasm for Manuel DeLanda's thought could take me further. I am currently reading Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy in which he certainly tests the reader's ability to string together sets of abstract mathematical and philosophical constructs! but dishes out the rewards in equal measure. I've just about mastered chapter 1, in which he lays the groundwork for what's to come.

In a refreshing break from postmodernist epistemologies ranging from the solipsistic to the "reality is basically unknowable" kind, DeLanda couches Deleuze's realist ontology in terms understandable not only to philosophers, but also to scientists. No easy task. But thanks to his efforts, I am for the first time convinced that there is some light for a realist ontology in science . It is an area that, ever since Nietzsche said: "There are no facts, only interpretations", has looked very shaky.

Having said that, it would be easy to fall into the same old dichotomy of the subject vs. the object - but it is quite tempting to see Nietzsche's contributions, rising as they did initially out of an historical exploration of culture (The Birth of Tragedy), as an enormous mirror held up to humankind while he chants into our ears: "See, this is who you really are, you have been waiting for me all this time to show you." The first psychologist indeed, as he himself noted. The limits of a a certain kind of knowledge, i.e. knowledge mediated by humans - Kant's categories go suck. Where that would clip into this realist ontology to give us closure I have no clue at present - perhaps we would have to look at both from each other's perspective first - but whereas I am sure how Nietzsche's legacy can be traced to the postmodernist temperament, it is less clear to me in the case of Deleuze. In short, I don't know him well enough yet.

It has taken someone like Deleuze to re-establish realism by giving it a philosophical foundation that does not crumble when the first, familiar shots are fired from the other camp, and here DeLanda makes its relevance understandable for me.

I look forward to more!

Some interesting articles by DeLanda are available at the Institute for New Culture Technologies, have a look here. I read through this one and highlighted some sentences using Diigo. In it he fleshes out the importance of dynamical processes (a historical process as opposed to an essence - the crux of his new materialist ontology) in relation to economic markets.

It is worth pointing out that some of the ideas following from the math, such as a stable state fluctuating around the attractor, including the notion of perturbations that knock a trajectory out of its basin of influence, are quite reminiscent of concepts in systems theory and cybernetics which I once discussed here.