Building Babel · 11:20pm Dec 23rd, 2017
“The shadow of that hyddeous strength,
sax myle and more it is of length…”
~Sir David Lyndsay, Ane Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteour.
In the bible, there is a story about a place called Babel, and the Tower they built that bore the same name there. “Sax” or six miles high its length, as Lyndsay said in 1555. Up and up and up, scraping the heavens. The people came from all over to one place, either by choice or by force, enslaved and free, men and women, and up the tower went until they began to say that soon they would poke through the floors of heaven and stand among the gods themselves. They would waltz in like tourists on holiday and see the realm of the gods, defiling it with their touch and making it into just another tourist destination. Mindless, lemmings, they built and built until at last there was a council of war in the heavens.
They were in no danger, you see, at least not of invasion from the material plane. What tower could be so high that it could enter a new world? But it was not the possibility of success that was dangerous. It was the mindless unity, the vicious spirit of expansion. We shall take and make this our own, unmake and break until it is ours--we shall devour the fields and plant rocks if we must--we shall starve the world and stripmine it if we can--it was their impossible hubris in thinking they could build something so tall that it could touch heaven that was dangerous. Children, after all, sometimes show signs of the things they will become. In the gleaming of a young humanity’s eyes the godhead saw every evil repeated in endless recursive horror, over and over again. Today it was silly towers, tomorrow it was men strapped to engines to heat the homes of the rich with their blood, christians as party-favor torches, executions with molten gold, the sins that men do in the darkness, the insults to heaven they perform in the naked light of day. Unified in thought, tongue, flesh as they were they would make a hell of earth and what would stop them then? How far would they spread? How far into the galaxy would they carry their cancerous seed, and on how many alien soils warmed by alien suns would they plant and bear the flowers of their evil?
So they went down, the Hosts of Heaven, and confused mankind, tearing their unity apart with language.
Why am I telling you this story?
William Cullen Bryant wrote a poem called Thanatopsis, published 1817. The title means, roughly and with charity--seeing death. Morbid, isn’t it? Seeing death. Thanatopsis is looking out at or looking with death in mind, viewing things in the grim washed out light of the grave.
He says, in closing of the poem (itself a Epicurean/Lucretian valediction forbidding the fear of mortality):
“So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”
And if you know where I’m going then… good. I’m glad. Cause I’m pretty terrible at getting it across.
We want to return to the unity. We want, we desperately crave, this return. It is hardwired into us to seek Babel again. That uniformity of purpose, language, visage, all of it. We want it. We need it. We need to feel a part of the endless horde that sneers as it curbstomps nature and man alike forever. Freud talks about the death principle, about this idea that we are somehow careening towards death by unconscious desire, and Bryant has us looking towards it in the manner of Lucretius. Babel, the unity, the Mob, are always with Nimrod--Nimrod, the Hunter before the Lord the Butcher the God King--and when we see Babel and its splendour as a vibrant sign of life, then we have mistaken it. All of these things lead into Death and are in View of Death. We build mausoleums, not for the living, but to house the dead knowing that we shall join them, dreaming unremembered dreams that we will rule among them on a throne of stripped flesh, that we shall be Nimrod.
If you don’t believe me, then you’ve not been around people much, I think. Where two or more are gathered, murder waits in every stone they come across. Every person is, really, a threat to you. Every person is a ravenous shark the same as you know, in shame or in grinning eagerness, that you are. Because you are. You know it. Unless you’ve either ascended to some sainthood I can only dream of or are somehow the only Good Boy, you’ve a monster curled around your heart. It sleeps in your rib cage. It sees everything in the view of death--it looks on everything as if from the cliffs of Thanatopsis--it wants to go back to Babel. You feel it, don’t you, sometimes? It begins to nose at your chest from the inside, right under your ribs. When you’re so angry you could almost feel the veins bursting on your forehead, when your vision narrows in fury, when your heart is in your throat and the endorphin drug of righteous anger fills your every extremity with fire and you almost believe that God made you to strike down the wicked. It whines, half-awake, when you stare in defeat at the wall, knowing nothing matters now or ever, when you know that all flesh meets its end one way or another, and to no use or utility.
I think about Babel and Nimrod and Bryant’s Thanatopsis a lot when I see certain kind of discourse on the web. I do this because, fundamentally, I am incapable of just directly touching anything. Whether this is common to all, a symptom of trauma, a quirk of personality, a idiosyncrasy of privilege and particular sorts of reading, I have no idea and speculation is probably pointless. (Most speculation is, really, pointless.) I cannot seem to touch the thing itself, the issue, the feeling, the deed, the person, what have you, with bare skin. Either I cannot abide it or I am merely unable. It doesn’t matter which.
But I’ve done due diligence to that hesitation or that inability. I have danced around the point, as I must, as I always do, and with that foreplay out of the way I may lay my body down upon the symposium couch--here, there’s yours--and talk to the point.
I think that Thanatopsis is, ultimately, why the worst sorts of people always seem to make it. I think it’s why the assholes seem to win in real life, and why the most horrifyingly bad people manage to somehow attract great flocks of cheering lovers. I think it’s why hacks sell books so fast and in such great quantities that they break the bestseller lists. I think it's how mediocre porn makes money. I think it’s why people go to places like the redneck bar I’ll write about one day out in Madison County, or why they trawl /pol/ or the Daily Stormer or read the Onion or do heroin or chainsmoke behind walmart in the grass at 2 AM after drinking a red solo cup full of southern comfort mixed with rum. This looking-on-death/looking-from-death that built Babel, that wore brownshirts to hunt the Other, that makes callout posts on Tumblr, that careens drunkenly through the streets on November 9th, 2016, waving what they think is a confederate battle flag and yelling at anyone who isn’t white enough--I think it is all bound in Babel.
I’m writing, to be clear, because my girlfriend got brigaded and I’m still not over it. Thought I should at least admit that.
Also because I’ve been in a fey mood for… a week or two. Forgot my meds, had a panic attack in my car, pathetically scrabbled for coffee and sat in the light because I’m afraid of the dark--nyctophobia is lovely--and because the Problem of Evil has haunted me my whole life. Why do people do bad things? It’s easy to say self-interest, but that doesn’t really scan well. The evil that men do bites them in the ass with iron teeth more often than not. To qoute Paul--
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
--And that rings true. Few are those who would describe what they truly wish as “Nah, man, I just want to be the absolute most garbage. I just want to piss on puppies and burn kids and shoot people until I die choking on my tongue from overdose.” As much as I have a quarrel with the idea of a fixed universal code, there is something very fundamental in the first chapter of C. S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man where he makes a very mundane point.
You know, we all argue as if there were some sort of standard.
What is this standard? What Lewis calls the Tao I call the law of Life. We want to live. But, again with Paul, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” We are vividly, agonizingly, always aware of this dying in our being, this leaning, this looking into and from death. The beating of our heart is both Paul’s agony cry and “still like muffled drums are beating”. The Psalm of Life and the Dirge play together in winding hypostasis.
How do we respond to Death? I think we do it in as many ways as there are people. I think also that those ways shuffle into three camps.
It is reflected everywhere. “Tell me not,” Longfellow bellows, “in mournful numbers, / Life is but an empty dream!” Or, if you’ve read my blogs going back aways--
I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”[h]
“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
--For when completeness comes, and you can find the rest. The first camp is Life. It is change and the leap of faith, it is the spirit behind the folly of Hegel and the church that Francis built in the wilderness. The choice to live is the madness that breathes life into dry bones.
Milton imagined it as twins--allegro and pensoro--and he’s like, on the right road? He’s on his way to that Damascus I call Death but he’s a man of no compromise and fire, and so I think he doesn’t see that middle camp.
I don’t think he sees the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
There’s this scene in Paradise Lost that I think about and chortle over often. The rebellion in heaven is in full swing and the angels are in full tumult of war. Satan retreats for the day and returns with what else but the first cannon. The war escalates, and the hosts of heaven take to throwing mountains. Milton was a man of highs and lows--heaven and hell--but he forget earth between.
Between the heights of Life and the lows of Despair lieth the shadow, because stealing other’s words and putting news in the blank is the modus operandi of this whole thing. The shadowlands, not unlike Lewis’ judgement of middengeard itself, are a place of falsehoods. In the grand scheme of things, the myths get told here as “lies, though breathed in silver”. The truths of the mountains and of the pits alike exist here as stories to be discarded. This is the border where the bus from hell parks out of The Great Divorce. The soul here will not leap, but will not lie down and die. It falters. It falters and says that both choices are bad, and so it sits like the poor bastards on the top floor of the burning building waiting to be pulled out the window.
But I originally was thinking of the third camp, the camp to which in the end all of those in the shadowlands find their way eventually unless they are lucky, unless they by fortune escape.
“So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick.”
When he heard this, Jesus said, “This sickness will not end in death.”
One of my favorite books is Soren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death. What is the sickness unto death? He says that it is despair. Despair is not crying. It is not grief. “Thus when the ambitious man, whose slogan was "Either Caesar or nothing", does not become Caesar, he is in despair over it. But this signifies something else, namely, that precisely because he did not become Caesar he now cannot bear to be himself.” Despair, and I’m borrowing heavily here, seems to be a self-negation.
I started this with Babel and then moved to death. What’s the connection?
To me, Babel isn’t about hubris or glory or offending the heavens so much as it is about our dealing with death. We are very, very bad at it. Building towers to escape it seems nonsensical, but its not without precedent. In New Orleans they build great structures for the dead on swampy ground. We built pyramids and painted great tombs. We wrote things “more lasting than Bronze” and we carved our names in trees and we did a great many things.
To me, Babel is Thanatopsis gone horribly wrong. Bryant meant that we should live knowing that we will die in the sense we should not fear the end of all flesh. He meant that we should, yes, rage against the dying of the light, but not like a “boxer beating the air”. With measured, calm steps we would walk the long road into death knowing that it was nothing more than a rack to hang our coat from.
Building Babel, wearing fascist armbands, troll brigades, sending death threats to strangers, murder arson war rumors of war--Building Babel is what happens when we walk down into death paralyzed by choice and refusing to choose. It is Fear over Life. I think it’s what happens when the soul dies and there is nothing left of the person beneath. Evil and evil, big and small, the push into the canal and the guy who cuts you off out of spite on the interstate, the mundane travails, all building Babel to ward off death. We are hurt. We are dying. We would die fighting, but instead of fighting to live we have decided we must take the world with us.
It seems extreme to pull all the evils in the world into a single camp, and it is. It sounds as if I’m saying that Evil and evil, that small pettiness and atrocities are fundamentally or morally the same. I’m not. I’m not trying to.
What I’m saying is that the bad things we do have a common root. What I’m saying is that in every tiny indignity, there is the same seed. What I’m saying is that Lewis was right that we are always progressing towards one thing or another, each of us. Babel is not yet built. It may yet be confounded. It may yet be averted, and the horrors that come after may never be born. We are becoming horrors or saints more and more with every step. We are not these today. We shall not be them tomorrow. But time shall pull us closer and closer, and if we are not careful with the long roll of years we feel that death is more and more with us.
With time, we start to think about building towers to get away from it on the backs of anyone weak enough to enslave.
With time, everything that rises converges--and everything that refuses to budge or falls backward rots.
Well, I was unaware of the dying in my being until you pointed it out. D: Thanks.
This is, of course, a joke. :B
Hope she's okay. :C
I had the thought, way back when I was in high school, that many parts of life are very much like trying to get up via the downward escalator. You can climb very hard just to stay in place, sometimes. Apathy bears you inevitably downward. But there do seem to be some people who go "It's headed to hell anyway, might as well turn around and climb down".
Interestingly, I've been writing about death now for 310K words over the last 2+ years, since at 52, the prospect of mortality is more real to me than most of the kids who frequent this site, I'm sure! :)
(Outstanding essay, btw)
Seems like you've unpacked pride.
Well shit, dude. That was a heavy blog if I’ve ever read one.
Hope your girlfriend is doing alright. You can always poke me in Discord if you need to chat.
I couldn't possibly disagree more.
No. We really don't. Maybe half, maybe three-quarters of people do. Those who fear others and doubt themselves. Those who become devout Catholics, Muslims, Calvinists, Marxists, Nazis, or join some other tribe that promises unity and one simple moral code that will let us transcend our "mere flesh" and touch God.
What the rest of us want is not unity, but for all of you to stop telling us what to do.
No. The modern Babels are the Apollo program that sent humans to walk on the moon, the International Space Station, the sequencing of the human genome, the eradication of smallpox, the search for a cure for cancer, a cure for death. These things bring not death, but life. And they are the path to a kind of unity that isn't brought with a sword.
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Sir, my girlfriend isn't even a Catholic. Nor are you capable of reading comprehension if you think this post was about turning to Jesus to save us all. It's about the nihilism and despair that comes with the human instinct to gang up on other humans. if you read that as a a message into the story, it was with the greatest of internal biases and the most flagrant disregard for comparison, metaphor, or for the fact that she's the daughter of a minister and might, I dunno, be drawing on religious imagery when speaking on a more general subject the same way plenty of secular writers have.
If you think only religion drives humanity to hate, conquer, or murder, you have very little understanding of what drives us to religion in the first place.
4757770
Reading your response, I started to wonder if you'd read the same blog I had. It seems like you've keyed on some language that has slotted this blog post into the binary category 'writings by my philosophical enemies', and then responded as if it made the arguments that you expect from that. What even triggered the screed on Catholicism?
4757770
Lots of "we" and "us" here. I don't think Wulf was discriminating.
4757935 4757934 I assumed Cynewulf was a Catholic, because she's a member of the Catholic bronies, and she always sounds very Catholic, or Anglican. Sorry for the error.
But in this case the basic problem is the same. See below.
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Yes. The claims that humans are hopelessly evil; that we all desire unity; that our aspirations to do great things (as represented by the Tower of Babel) are evil; that these and the writer's other neuroses and ethical struggles are human universals. Jesus, Paul; a sympathetic rejection of Hegel; CS Lewis. The claim that compromise or moderation is a compromise of spirit and abandonment of the Truth (the "shadow of the valley of death") and that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." Recognizing Thanatopsis, but attributing it to a turning away from God rather than to the turn towards God.
I've seen it a thousand times before. I can fill in the gaps. It isn't specifically Catholic. One hears different pieces of it often these past hundred years from Anglicans. This is a well-worn path of thought.
Yes, I snapped. I'm sorry. I feel terrible for posting something so insensitive. I know Cynewulf is a good person. But this kind of talk terrifies me.
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That's right. She wasn't discriminating between the people who feel that way, and the people who don't. She was pretending that we all feel the way she feels. This is part of the pattern.
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You kinda missed the bit where she focused on tribalism, brigading, "call-out culture", and general acts of union as an angry mob instead of human accomplishment. While also like, venerating very human accomplishments of philosophers by using them as a point of reference. Her post is sobering but not angry at the idea that we might land on the moon. In fact, some of Cyne's stories specifically deal with strangeness and space travel.
What irks me about your reading is that you missed that the crucial line in the entire post is right here:
She's not using Babel as a metaphor for human accomplishment, she's using it as a metaphor for unity in a task that is wrong. Which is also evident if you paid any attention to this line:
You framed this as a discussion about human hubris or accomplishment, and it's neither. It's about how fear of our own mortality makes us cling to groups, and group justice leads us to commit the exact kind of atrocities you listed, blaming them on the Catholic church. You framed it that way because you made assumptions about the author, about the context, about discussions you've had in the past. Not because it had an ounce of relation to the main thrust of the post.
4757980
If you've seen an essay like this a thousand times, I'd be very, very, very surprised.
What you filled the gaps in with here says a lot more about you than it does about what was actually said.
4757980
Ah, it was the generalization that caused offense.
EDIT: Reading over Cynewulf's essay again, there was clearly a fair amount of anger. I can't say that I wouldn't have reacted the same way if my significant other were attacked.
Would you be willing to allow some leeway?
4757980
I think you're seeing religious language and automatically drawing way too heavily on personal negative experience, because what you're saying does not look like what I read. Religion is accused of being one of the negative outlets for that destructive impulse in this blog! Cyne is half in agreement with you, and you seem to have missed it.
The idea that a destructive impulse exists in and is an inherent part of human nature is not the same as the idea that human nature is inherently evil, nor is it inextricably linked to the idea that humans therefore need religion to curb that impulse--those are the unsupported jumps I'm reading in what you've written.
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I feel very bad about responding to the post at all. I wrote in an accusatory manner that Cynewulf didn't deserve, and I know she doesn't need drama right now.
Since I've already done it, though, I'd better explain why what I wrote seems disconnected from her essay.
Cynewulf's essay isn't the kind you can read as a self-contained text. By itself, it's hard to make sense of, and, yes, my extrapolations may all be wrong.
But there is an awful lot of self-consistent subtext there. It's full of coded references to ancient traditions. For instance, take the phrase
The word "completeness" in this context refers to the ancient Greek word τελειότης, which is usually translated "perfection." When used in a Christian context, one must know that in the New Testament, the word is used to signify merely "completion" in the Aristotelian sense of, for instance, a human who has become wise, while in Plato and in the works of the early Church fathers, it's used to signify "perfection" in the Platonic sense. Using the phrase "when completeness comes", signifying a sharp transition, rather than something like "as completeness develops", signifying a gradual or approximate process, suggests it is not completeness the way Jesus and Aristotle used it (though Aristotle did think in terms of instantaneous transitions), but that the person is speaking in the Catholic tradition, which selectively misinterprets τελειότης in specific New Testament passages neo-Platonically, and therefore attaches great importance to a host of Catholic doctrines about the nature of God and of the Trinity.
The importance that the early Church placed on these doctrines, which Jesus didn't think were important enough to explain, caused most of the persecutions of heretics by the Catholic Church from about 325 AD -- 800 AD. By 1100 AD persecution of heretics had shifted from Christological heretics such as the Arians and Monophysites, to Christians who were making vernacular translations of the Bible and protesting against the non-Biblical aspects and economic policies of the Catholic Church, such as the Waldensians, Stedingers, Lollards, Hussites, and Protestants. Scholastic disputation turned from neo-Platonism toward Aristotle in the 13th century.
So this phrase "when completeness comes", and also the many references to Platonism, suggest that the speaker is more interested in the neo-Platonist Christology of the Church's first millenium, than in the more fundamental reforms, reactions, and Aristotelian rationality of its second millenium. That suggests a deep metaphysical conservatism, a prioritization of neo-Platonist theories of the Good over real-world suffering (though this contradicts the Oxford Movement link below), and an affinity with the "Kultur / Civilization" dichotomy of Nietzsche, Wagner, Spengler, and the Nazis, and with the "Middle Ages / modernity" dichotomy of post-modernism.
The use of capital letters in words such as Life, Death, and Truth indicates they're being used in a Platonic sense. In this usage, following Plato's example, the redefinition of the word in the transcendent realm is typically used to radically change and often reverse its meaning, so that Happiness means virtuous suffering (as in Boethius), Freedom means slavery (as in Hegel) or material wealth (as in Marx), Life means death, and Death means life. This is the tradition George Orwell was referring to in 1984 when he spoke of the Ministry of Truth etc. I think that's going on with her use of Life and Death throughout the essay.
"Leap of faith" invokes Kierkegaard. This is confirmed by the later reference to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is affiliated with existentialism, an irrationalist recasting of philosophical realism, and phenomenology, which is associated with the modernist rejection of science.
"the spirit behind the folly of Hegel" probably indicates recognition that Hegel's program was to update Platonism for a post-Enlightenment world. Sympathy for Hegel implies a departure from Catholicism; "folly" implies rejection of Hegel. The manner in which one rejects Hegel determines which of the 4 major paths of post-Enlightenment Platonism one goes down: Anglo-Catholicism, autonomous Art, Marxism, or some kind of nationalism such as Nazism.
"the church that Francis built" refers to the founding of the Franciscan order, which is an excellent order as these things go--but it also suggests a connection to Anglo-Catholicism, as the 19th-century Oxford Movement admired the Franciscan order and adopted many ideas from them. "the wilderness" literally means the wilderness where Francis founded his order, but is usually used as John the Baptist used it: as a metaphor for the depravity of the world, signifying the separation from the Logos and the inability of humans to manage their own affairs rationally (a dog-whistle most closely affiliated with Christianity, but also a doctrine of modernism and post-modernism).
So this paragraph alone contains a lot of dog whistles, most directly references to Platonism and its use, but also connotations of Anglo-Catholic belief (which are reinforced by the references to Lindsay, CS Lewis, and Milton) and anti-rationalism. In just a few words we've collected a really dangerous set of ideas: Platonism / philosophical realism, the Hegelian / 20th-century Anglo-Catholic / phenomenological / modernist / post-modern rejection of empirical science, an Anglo-Catholic Oxford-Movement scholasticism that accepts irrational leaps as valid moves, and Kultur. When you combine this with the themes of Babel, depravity, Thanatopsis, and the presumed despair of materialists and Aristotelian practitioners of moderation, it isn't hard to see where it's going: back to the Dark Age.
I regard the references to bad things done by other types of philosophical realists as relatively meaningless. Pointing out flaws in others is not evidence that you don't have those flaws yourself.
I can't take the time to explicate the entire essay this way, but it's full of similar words of affiliation and connotation. You can't interpret it literally, by itself. The interpretation I make of it by considering these things is approximately what I outlined above.
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Okay, so this is still playing on my mind, and since I used to think of you as a thoughtful, intelligent person who could actually be reasoned with, I'm going to have one stab at a real, actual response.
Let me lay out a timeline of events for you:
-Scarlet posts a blog about some stuff.
-That blog gets brigaded hard by people who are fairly nasty and hateful, including some outright hate speech.
-Cynewulf writes and posts this post as a response.
-You turn up in the comments with some things to say about your understanding of Cynewulf's message, including the fact that you find that message scary.
-Various other people, including some involved in the original incident, some close friends, and some who helped have a look at the post's rough draft and discussed it before it went up--all those various people tell you that you were mistaken, and have misunderstood the actual point being made.
-You shoot back a reply that talks about the real, true meaning of words that Cyne used, and the real true, hidden-yet-obvious message that means you're completely right and everyone, however well they know the author and what the author is like and what circumstances led to this and what it's really about are all wrong, and you know the Real Truth.
Do you realize at this point that pretty much the only thing separating what you have said from long rants about the Illuminati and the hidden messages in triangles everywhere is that your knee-jerk hate reaction is against The Christians rather than against The Jews?
You have constructed an actual conspiracy theory about how those who know Cyne are wrong, and those who were involved in the incident that incited this are wrong, and the plain parts of the essay itself, that use straightforward language, are wrong, and the Real Truth is hidden in greek translations and the "obvious" interpretation of various references, and coupled this with a message that people need to fear the agenda behind this real truth.
Please.
Once upon a time I had a huge amount of respect for you.
Don't be like that.
Don't need to be right so desperately that you construct conspiracy theories, and don't hate and fear people who are on the "other" side of an arbitrary divide. Cyne is not some hateful zealous christ-warrior who wants to bring back the dark ages. She is an amazing person who thinks in fascinating and unique ways, and invokes scripture with the irony and bitterness of somebody who's been done wrong by religion in many ways, as well as with the love of somebody who's found solace in it. You painting her as some kind of religious fanatic does her no justice, and it does you none either.
Step back and think. Step back and consider the human. Step back and look again at what people are saying here, and not at what you need to believe about what they're saying so that you can be right.
Please.
4758399 We disagree about how words and humans work.
I think most of Cyne's essay is very unclear taken literally, and it is almost entirely composed of Bible stories and quotations and references to theologians and philosophers. Most of Cynewulf's posts and many of the titles of her stories refer to Christianity and/or Western philosophy. It would be hopeless to try to interpret her without recourse to Christianity and Western philosophy. Cynewulf is the one here obsessed with theology. If she doesn't want these connotations, why does she use the words and phrases? We've already seen that the same people involved here don't cut Milo Yiannopoulos any slack if he wears an Iron Cross and claims it's not a Nazi symbol, and think there's some significance when people march with tiki torches or wave Confederate flags. Why do the rules of signification change for her?
I think that the cluster of ideas that she circles about are dangerous, but I don't accuse her of any ill-will. I don't even claim that she's conscious of the things I see in her writing. People are seldom aware of the implications of their metaphysics.
I don't believe that words work in only one direction, from the speaker upon the listener. The words one speaks also work on oneself, even if one is unaware of their implications.
As I said, I might be wrong. But you ask me to read her words literally, as if all the Bible stories and quotations and references to Plato and other philosophers and poets were irrelevant. That would be more absurd than any conspiracy theory I could cook up.
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Well you just Godwin'd this entire thing, compared Cyne to a nazi while claiming to hold no ill will, and you're also insisting that your secret truth is so secret even the writer doesn't know it's there and yet you're you're still the one person clearly seeing the Truth and all the other people who read the same words and came to a totally different conclusion must be wrong. (And just for the record, I'm NOT asking you to ignore the references, I'm saying they should be taken in light of the clear language also present, not interpreted conspiracy theory fashion as if that clear language wasn't there at all.) So I'm done. Really done. In a "I don't think I'm going to be interacting with you anymore" kind of way, to be honest.
Your ideological obsessions are making it pretty much impossible for me to respect you anymore. You have built yourself a tower, and not a tower of Babel because you built it alone. An ivory tower, if you will, where you hear nothing but your own opinions and where you can look down and judge people who are different from you as insidiously evil, to the point where even the ones you think mean well are still fearfully dangerous. I'd say I hope it's nice up there and that you're happy, but I don't think it is and I don't think you are.
4758425 I did not "compare Cyne to a Nazi". I compared the way you say I should interpret Cyne's writings with the way the people you say you agree with interpret what other people do. I chose those examples because they're the examples which that group of friends have expressed opinions about on fimfiction blog posts.
I did not claim to clearly see the Truth, and I don't even believe in the Truth. I said, twice, that all the other people who read the same words and came to a totally different conclusion are NOT necessarily wrong, including in the message you just replied to.
I don't know what Cyne's post is supposed to mean "in clear language", because almost the entire concluding section is metaphoric language.
... which of us does that describe better right now?
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>swings and misses on original post reading
>doubles down
>swings and misses again
>redoubles down
>brings out Milo Yannoupolous
>"I totally didn't bring up Nazis"
>redoubles down again
4758430 Okay, so, now that I've stopped laughing and reread this massive anti-religious wank-fest you've been on, I think I'm ready to actually reply.
I'll preface this by saying that I'm not religious. Spiritual, sure. Religious, no.
Since you're all about inferring things in Cyne as a person through her blogs, her writing, her metaphors, etc, I think it a good idea to return the favor.
Judging by how you write and present yourself, how you deliberately select the biggest, most impressive words from your thesaurus to grace our eyeballs and wow us with your diction, how you argue from one immeasurably narrow point of view and try this "isn't this interpretation equally as valid" bullshit that has literally been the basis for every Creationist/Flat Earth argument since the idiots realized they could make scientists stumble on that road block, and, in general, how you fail to register the most obvious of hints in people's reactions to the utter shit you've chosen to spew forth, I make the following judgement:
You're a dick.
Which is fine! I'm a dick too! The difference here is that I generally don't try to imply that someone is involved in "dangerous circles" because religion has been a major part of their upbringing. I understand the context of where someone has come from, how that might have affected them, and how that impacts their decisions. I also know how to look at the person's actions and make a sound judgment.
So, with that said, Cyne doesn't travel or involve herself in dangerous circles. She had a religious upbringing. Woop-de-mother-fucking-doodle-do!
But let's turn back to you.
You're making snap judgments about a person and their circle based on the fact that "there are obvious religious references." I will not deny that there are religious references in Cyne's writing, as that would be, in a word, imbecilic—so, I'm already doing better than your entire argument here. With that said, we can infer that you're the sort who judges people based not on their action or how they treat others, but on your base assumptions on them lumped together with a vocal minority of the group they're involved in. So much for intellectualism, he?
Look into how quickly you got triggered by the mere presence of religion here—like this is some high fucking offense?—and demanded that Cyne stop telling you what to do like she was preaching gospel. For such a supposedly intelligent person, I can say that you've failed woefully at reading comprehension. Primary school might be a good place to revisit for that.
You then went on about how "this kind of talk terrifies me." Well, buttercup, watching some neckbeard on the internet go off on a tangent on how religion is just the source of all evil ever (fucking KEK, pal) and how Cyne, who is legitimately one of the nicest people on this site, is involved in dangerous circles "because religion," and how your half-baked interpretation of it is perfectly valid because ... literally nothing but "this is how I feel when I see a few references, also those are totes dog-whistles." The fucking terrifies ME. Not "oh noes, they'll hurt me."
More "oh, fuck, I hope he/she/it/mayonnaise doesn't breed."
Are you aware of what a dog-whistle is in a rhetorical sense? A dog whistle is a reference no one is going to get without some deep digging. We are literally reading a blog on the internet. Google is a thing. Copy, paste, extrapolate, step back, think for five seconds about what the person is ACTUALLY SAYING rather than what you've DECIDED they're saying, return to your desk, type out your response, don't be an arrogant cunt and double down on your idiocy when you get called on it, try to avoid the bullshit "my completely off-base interpretation is valid because it scares ME" shit. Or head over to Tumblr for a cuddle or three.
Repeat as needed in future blog posts
You are the exact opposite of an intellectual by any interpretation. Sit down, shut up, and piss off.
You owe Cyne an apology. And I don't mean the halfassed one you gave here in public.
I'm sure you'll get right on that though.
4758305
So if you reference philosophers you don't like, religious imagery and history you don't like, or really any imagery you don't like because it's associated with Catholicism, Christianity, or the enlightenment philosophers you like, you are dogwhistling and writing back to the dark ages. Got it.
I'm sorry did you forget how metaphors and imagery work yesterday morning, or is this how you read everything? Didn't you once lecture me on how fiction didn't need to have any direct connection to reality? Why then should metaphors be required to contort themselves to your narrative arc of how things work? Do you think people who reference Ragnarok or Zeus are neopagans? If I reference Aleister Crowley, does that make me a mystic?
If this kind of drivel is all you have to bring to the table, we don't need you. Preach your gospel of terrible reading comprehension elsewhere.
By the way, the Gospel is a reference to the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They're considered holy texts in the larger body of the Christian Bible, and usually pointed to as the four paramount books as they function as accounts of the teachings and life of the central figure of the religion. They were also preached by evangelists like Billy Graham, whose son Franklin Graham is one of the most disturbing Christian fundamentalists currently active in the religious sphere today.
Conclusion; I am dogwhistling a homophobe.
Oh, and fuck off with the Yiannopolous shit. Yiannopolous's issue wasn't resorting to nazi imagery, it was literally fraternizing with and cultivating an audience of nazis. Cyne's never done similar things with the Focus on the Family crowd. She's certainly speaking a shared language, but using similar language to say something fundamentally different is kind of a thing we do all the damn time.
Honestly, I'm disappointed.
4758531 4758458 4758425
We're living in contentious times. There's a lot of polarization. For each of us, there are a lot of people and movements who hate us, and even who would like to get rid of us.
I don't hate any of you, or even dislike you. I don't have many important disagreements with you, and we haven't managed to have any significant disagreement about values or facts in this entire discussion--only disagreement about methodology and interpretation.
So if we, who are not enemies, part in hatred on Christmas day, what hope is there for the future?
I began this discussion very badly. I'm sorry that I was emotional. I'm sorry I didn't make it clear that I like Cynewulf. I was alarmed at the set of extremely conservative ideas and arguments that her words invoke, and I've seen other people follow related arguments to very reactionary and conservative political views. I should have asked her what she meant before expressing that alarm. I also think, though I didn't say, that being trans, and dwelling on neo-Platonist theology, are contradictory and may cause her a lot of anguish. I don't think that she hangs out with Spanish Inquisitors.
On your part, if you want to say no to hate, you need to recognize what you've been doing and how you've wronged me. You're all capable of rational thought, but you've all approached this discussion not using rational thought, but as an exercise in signalling affiliations. When I mentioned Milo and tiki torches, that wasn't to associate Cynewulf with Milo or tiki torches, but just the opposite. I was contrasting how you want other people to interpret the statements and actions of people you like, against how you or people you like interpret the statements and actions of people you don't like.
You're all capable of using language both ways--to make rational arguments, or to interpret it as a list of associations. You all choose which way to use it selectively, interpreting people who are signalling tribal affiliation with you as if they were writing rationally, while interpreting people who aren't signalling affiliation as if all they're doing is signalling affiliation. Here Cynewulf has written a long document which can only be read as a set of affiliations, and you ask me to interpret it rationally; yet when I respond with statements which I think I are obviously meant to be read as a rational argument, you interpret it as a list of associations.
All this approach can ever do is amplify hatred and division.
When you respond by saying "OMG he mentioned Milo and Cynewulf in the same paragraph; he thinks she's a Nazi", you're not crediting me with thinking rationally; you're assuming that all I'm doing is making associations. All you want to ask is whether I'm signalling affiliation: "Does Bad Horse like Cynewulf, or does he not like Cynewulf?" That's not what I was talking about.
I'll try to be more sensitive about what I say and how I say it, and to ask for clarification before making a judgement. But all of you need to stop beginning every discussion by looking for declarations of tribal affiliations, to be responded to by either embracing the person as a fellow tribe member, or casting them out into the darkness.
4758531
My issue here isn't who she references, but the combination of them, and part of the argument Cyne seems to be making, which I admit is very unclear to me. She isn't writing in any literalist tradition; she's writing in the hermetic tradition of stringing together lots of loaded phrases which invoke different philosophical traditions while leaving the arguments themselves unstated. It's similar to the tribal way of using language that I'm asking you not to use, though more sophisticated. That is, however, the way she's using language here, and the way I have to try to interpret it if I hope to make any sense of it.
4758784
4758784
Okay is it that hard to parse that maybe she wrote this to make sense of her own emotions after I got brigaded.
Like. She literally says she wrote this because I got brigaded. In the post.
This is like reading Lamentations and thinking it's about retrofuturism.
Wow it's almost like the post you just went forward to crusade on touched on that. [/deadpan]
It's really hard to find olive branches to extend when you keep snapping them before I can bother to pick them up.
No, I know what you meant. I'm just pretty sure you're still full of it.
You've spent all this time arguing that we're casting you out, and the fact is that no, we just told you that you managed to write a terrible fucking reading of what was a pretty plain blog to everyone here. You reached for a hermetic that made so little sense in the context of the blog that even Death of the Author can't save you, and you haven't even bothered to try invoking that. You've basically argued that, no, we who know Cyne and have eyes with which we read this post and an understanding of its context do not, in fact, really understand the context because you have a problem with invoking Christian iconography of a flawed humanity.
Hey you want me to stop believing in a flawed humanity? Maybe like, stop making indefensible readings of things my girlfriend wrote and then accusing everyone around you of trying to "force you out into the dark" for "tribal" reasons. You brought the tribal war here. You reached into that well and pulled it out so as to distract from the fact that you have yet to offer a single justification for why we shouldn't pay any attention to any kind of plain language that contextualizes the larger post that will hold water for five minutes.
Or do you want to return to discussing that, instead of dovetailing off to talk about Milo? Or would you prefer to talk about how you've lumped our arguments into a single argument instead of properly addressing us as individuals? Because while I did talk back to you about Milo, I told you to fuck off because the things that get Milo on my shitlist aren't applicable to the post at all, making the comparison false. but in responding, you say this:
Now clearly, in my post, I'm arguing that your invocation of Milo made no sense. But you don't actually say why no, it really does, you assume it does and then carry on to explain how I've wronged you.
I've taken debate classes where I'd be castigated for an argument that shoddy. You're responding by not-responding.
I'm not mad at you for not sharing my precise tribal affiliation. I'm mad at you because you're either arguing badly and refuse to admit it, or you're arguing in bad faith. Your position is not particularly tenable if this is all you have to justify it.
4759048
That was obvious, but that wasn't what the post is primarily about. The post is 3000 words long. That's a few sentences of it.
Okay, let me explain why, no, it really does make sense:
Oh, wait. I already wrote exactly that in the comment you just replied to. So I guess you didn't read it. Too eager to get your hit of righteous indignation.
The post doesn't just talk about a flawed humanity, but also a totally depraved humanity. I already quoted, I think, two explicit quotes and one allusion to that doctrine.
(But, yes, I would like you to stop believing in a flawed humanity. That is itself a Platonist concept. Humans can't be flawed, because there is no such thing as human perfection or completion. The word is convenient, but within this context it invokes Christian notions of what humanity is and should be.)
Same to you.
I tried to reach out to you. At least I can stop feeling bad for failing, now that I know I never had a chance.
4759096
Um
No.
Because if that's your point, I already addressed it. And you still failed to like, demonstrate why what I said was incorrect in any fashion. Because again, my point was that my larger objection to Yiannopolous was his cultivation of an active audience of neo-nazis, with his embrace of nazi dogwhistles and iconography being at best in poor taste and at worst directly pandering to that kind of audience. And even then, Yiannopolous's actual non-nazi politics are hardly compelling (he basically exists to be a human aristocrats joke in order to protect the right to be a human aristocrats joke, which is not a particularly compelling argument for free speech. That's the kind of thing that people who hate free speech will point to when they argue against it, in fact. That it's used for such stupidity.)
But bringing that kind of logic to Cyne's post makes very little sense, because she deliberately contextualized her post not as fundamentalist in nature, or in compliance with any orthodox view of the story of the Tower of Babel. She's meandering perhaps, but her clarity is there. That you failed to use it for its actual purpose is a failing of you, not the writer.
If you feel like this:
Addresses this:
What you've failed to read is that I've already given you plenty of context for why your comparison wasn't well chosen even in the context you claim to be presenting it. or, you know, to put it another way:
You still haven't actually responded, because you have yet to explain how the reasons we dislike Milo (the actual audience he's cultivating, his unclear messaging, his decision to use and accept a platform that directly writes to and about white supremacists) applies to Cyne using religious imagery in a largely secular message of "people seem determined to band together and do things that aren't right when they fear death". You're not really addressing anything she wrote.
You certainly could. You could've, I don't know, argued that the fear of death isn't a primary motivator for the instinct to band together in tribal groups. (You came close, but you never really articulate it in those straightforward terms). You could also argue that maybe the basic goodness in humanity is compelling enough that we can hope for the future in spite of that. You could do any number of those things.
You could've even, I don't know, accepted that the post isn't really about making an argument, it's about exploring a mental space, similar to some of Cyne's previous blogs (which all meander across a general theme, using iconography, personal anecdotes, and history to explore it). It's not a mode of writing that's really appropriate to treat as an argument because the primary purpose is exploring an emotional and mental landscape of the author. While I can certainly understand being concerned with the associations of iconography, your concerns seem pretty reductive from where I'm standing. You managed to twist that iconography into directions it was never meant to go, and where the text never sends it, instead arguing again and again that using clear text to contextualize surrounding text is wrong because the post is heavy on both metaphor and analogy.
Which. Like. Why? You have yet to really explain why. Again and again, you continue as though you've already made your points to the satisfaction of all here. And again and again, I keep saying "what points?"
The ones you made in your post detaling the hermetic? SPark's right, that's a conspiracy-theory level reading. You're constructing it to fit your conclusion, not the other way around. The competing readings here alone shed doubt on whether your concerns are valid.
But hey, if you wanna be smarmy about it and argue that I'm an idiot, that's fine. Just do me a favor: prove you're the more intellectually honest one by taking this opportunity to quit what you're doing.
If you want to keep going like this, fine, but you'll be signalling to me that you're less interested in conversation and more interested in trying to be right when you started wrong and managed to head downhill from there.