All Hallows Eve; Halloween; Samhain; Day of the Dead; All Souls Day; October 31. Whatever it is. I hope it is good for you.



I've been reading Mindware and Mindmatters. I have so much to learn about the Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Science and AI before I go to NSI in January. Yes, it looks like that is where I'll be. I hope La Jolla isn't too hot- I hate the heat. I study and read and write as much as I can, and it doesn't seem to make a dent. Learning is like quicksand, the more you read the more you realise how little you know.


I don't know if I mentioned this before, but when I attended the first contact improvisation class, we did this excercise where you touch your partner only with the tip of the index finger on one hand. One person leads and the other follows, and you dance. Twirling, rolling on the floor etc ensued. It was very fun because we weren't in full physical contact, which I would have hated, and yet we were able to really 'play.' After about 10 minutes of occasionally switching whom was leading and whom was following, we were pretty good at reading one another. At the beginning of the class, my partner had actually walked directly over to me and said, "I want to work with you." So, I was feeling pretty good about our interactions. Then the professor started saying 'switch' over and over so that the person that as 'leading' was constantly changing about every 10 seconds. About 2 minutes after the last switch, my partner started to get very aggressive in leading- we were getting very energetic about the dance. We were rolling on the ground and spinning and twirling and just flying across the studio space, and at one point my partner said to me, "You're leading, right?" And of course I had just been following her lead the entire time, it never occured to me that we lost track of who was leading during the rapid 'switch' aspect. Who was leading all that time? Ouija Dancing- dancing with the dead.

Thank you, bride, for 緣份: is a noun that refers to a predestined relationship between two people. It's an attraction of souls.

The familiar word, carnival, has an interesting Latin etymology meaning “putting away the flesh,” or “farewell to the flesh.” It seems to have originated in connection with the custom of Lent (from the Old English, lang, or the “lengthening” days of spring), the forty-day period of renunciation of fleshly indulgence just prior to Easter. However, the period before Lent, culminating in Mardi Gras (or “fat Tuesday”), is now known as “carnival” in many countries—a period of excessive fleshly indulgence, rather than renunciation.

Funny angelology stuff in someone else's journal:

a transcription of Dee’s tabula bonorum angelorum invocationes from Sloane MS. 3191, and in the section nomina sedecim bonorum angelorum qui in metallorum inventione, collectione, usu et virtute &c., There are also angels in this libellum called “Taco,” “Diary” and “Oopz”—so sometimes I find it a bit hard to take seriously, really. o uos quatuor angeli lucis, fideles, dei nostri creatoris ministri, o uos, brap, taco, diari et oopz

Woman once a bird by Joel-Peter Witkin (at left). I think I've seen a few of this man's prints, but I never knew his name. Thank you for the reminder from a former bennington student and 'college chum' of mine, couriernew.

jgambrell pointed me to an op-ed piece by Philip Pullman in today's nyt:








Why I Don't Believe in Ghosts
By PHILIP PULLMAN</b>
Published: October 31, 2003

OXFORD, England

Tonight is Halloween, All Hallows' Eve, a time of ghosts and spirits walking by night . . . which leads me naturally to think about literary realism, and about politics. How can you write in a truthful and realistic way about something that doesn't exist?

I don't take much notice of critics, except when they praise me extravagantly. But one of the remarks they sometimes make about my work does coincide with a mild puzzlement I feel about it myself: in common with some other writers whose work is read by children, I am chided for writing fantasy, because fantasy is a lesser form than realism, and everyone knows that there are no such things as elves or hobbits or, for that matter, ghosts and disembodied spirits, so nothing interesting or truthful can be said about them.

My usual response to that is to deny that I'm writing fantasy at all, and to maintain that all my work is stark realism. But that implicitly accepts the basic stance of the critic: that fantasy is a lesser kind of thing, and that realism is the highest form of literary art.

And there may be something in that. For example, take ghost stories. I don't believe in ghosts and disembodied spirits. I used to believe in them, and I can remember how thrilling it was, when I was a child, to read ghost stories with the thought, "This could be true, this could really happen. . . ." But that was a long time ago. I don't enjoy ghost stories in quite the same way these days. The trouble is that such tales have to convince you on the supernatural level as well as on the mundane. Part of your mind has to believe that there could be a disembodied spirit full of malice haunting this old house, there could be a nameless evil presence lurking in the crypt — and there just couldn't. Disbelief, at that point, is just too heavy to suspend.

The ghost stories I still enjoy, like "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James, work because of their ambiguity. We're never really sure whether the evil presences are being imagined by the protagonist, so we can read the story as if it's a tale of psychological disturbance, and it makes enough sense that way.

I do believe, however, in disturbing places: there are houses that feel as if they're haunted. Three years ago I slept (or tried to) in a hotel room in Glasgow that was one of the most creepy places I've ever been in. But I am also persuaded by an explanation that has nothing to do with ghosts. Certain subliminal sounds or visual stimuli — the hum of an air-conditioner, the flicker of a fluorescent light — can resonate at the exact frequency that causes hallucinatory images to appear in the brain, or that induces feelings of panic or unease. Replace the neon tube, tighten the screws on the housing, and the haunting ceases as if by exorcism.

So there ain't no ghosts. The trouble is. . . .

The trouble is that for a writer of fiction (well, for me, anyway) expunging the uncanny isn't always a good thing. The rational, daylight, functional, get-about-and-do-things part of my mind welcomes the broom of reason as it sweeps away the cobwebs of spookery. But I don't write with that part of my mind, and the part that does the writing doesn't like the place cleaned up and freshly painted and brightly lit.

My daylight mind, the conscious and responsible me, might want to write stories about people who seem entirely real in situations that seem utterly plausible. I might want to explore family relationships or moral dilemmas or social problems or political questions that are entirely free of the fantastic, the ghostly, the uncanny. As a matter of fact, I do want to. Books like that are the sort I like to read; things like that are the things I think important. So I want to write stories about subjects like that.

That is to say, my will wants to. But my imagination doesn't.

When I try, it's like trying to light a fire with damp wood. Nothing catches. Making the will do the work of the imagination is a wearisome and melancholy task, and it would drive you mad with despair in no time if you let it. And there's no need to, after all; when there is dry tinder nearby, and when the spark of your imagination leaps toward it like a lover, you can have a fine blaze roaring in a moment, if a blaze is what you want.

So I came to the conclusion some time ago that imagination and reason were two powers that didn't always agree, and that the one who had sovereignty was the imagination. There's nothing democratic about what goes on in this business. Everything about the act of writing fiction is an exercise of absolute and despotic power. There's no point in deploring this, or wishing it were all nicer and kinder, or gentle and caring and inclusive. It's a tyranny, and that's that.

However, none of this is to say that we have to abandon every other faculty just because we've ceded dominance to one. In fact, we mustn't. If we don't bring everything we have to the task of writing a story, there's a psychological cost: we feel that it's a fundamentally trivial and worthless occupation, and we despise ourselves for wasting our efforts on something so contemptible.

Reason, memory, emotional experience, whatever we know of social and political truth, the craftsmanship we have slowly and laboriously acquired — all these things must come into play. Only then is the task worth doing. But these faculties must work under direction; there's no discussion, and there are no votes. They must behave like the devoted subjects of a tyrant, and dedicate their utmost efforts to serving their ruler.

For example, "The Turn of the Screw." Reading James's notebooks, we learn that the origin of that story was a supposedly true tale told him by the archbishop of Canterbury, in which the disturbing presences were definitely ghosts, with no ambiguity about them at all. But something in it caught fire in his mind. Once his imagination was engaged, his profound intelligence played over the situation and introduced the doubt, the mystery, and transformed a dinner-table anecdote into a work of art.

In my own case (and although I'm making no comparisons of quality, I think the process is similar) when I was playing with the opening of my story "His Dark Materials," I came on the idea of a personal daemon: an aspect of a character's personality that has animal form and is visible. It was the vivid pictorial craziness that caught my mind at first. But I very soon realized that unless I made that notion serve whatever I know of psychological realism, it would merely distract from the story; so I tried to find a way of making it say something about the characters that was both truthful and interesting. The notion comes first, and is sovereign and capricious. The conscious working-out plods along afterwards, obedient, diligent and, if it has the sense, modest.

I don't know if there's a lesson in this, except for those of us who write fiction. If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your imagination is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics or adultery among the artists or the perils threatening the environment, but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons, then feed the flames, feed the flames.

So that's why I welcome Halloween, and it's why, although I revere the great realists and read their work with devoted admiration, I know I'm not one of them. My imagination comes to life only in the presence of the uncanny; the despot I serve is the part of my mind that feels a thrill as fierce and sudden as lust when it encounters a deserted graveyard, or comes on the idea of personal daemons, or hears those old familiar words: "Once upon a midnight dreary. . . ."

But isn't there something a little politically dubious about all this emphasis on despotism and absolute power and so on? Isn't there any room for democracy in this vision of literature?

Well, yes. Democracy comes in at a later stage, when we start reading. Reading is democratic all the way through. But that's another story.


Philip Pullman is author of the series "His Dark Materials,'' whose most recent volume is "The Amber Spyglass.''