Evening Note for Sunday, October 18

 Thought for the Evening: The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin

In 1987, Stephen R. Lawhead published Taliesin, the first book in The Pendragon Cycle, closely followed by Merlin in 1988 and Arthur in 1989. Later he followed this up with Pendragon (1994), Grail (1997), and the rather different Avalon (1999), and more recently has added Aurelia (2025), which is the only one in the cycle I haven't read. The first trilogy is truly excellent; growing up, I read them a lot. The style of them was particular interesting -- Lawhead interwove the myth of Atlantis, various stylized versions of Celtic myths, Arthurian legend, and a sort of vaguely Celticized Evangelical Christianity into something that was quite fresh and new.

I was interested, then, to watch the recent streaming series, The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin, which is based on Taliesin and Merlin. I can recommend it quite highly. It is imperfect. It really does not do justice to the excellent story of Taliesin, rushing through it, but its recent success on Amazon Prime makes it reasonably likely there will be a second season, and one hopes that they can at least get more of it in flashbacks. Taliesin is not a household name the way Merlin is, so it's not surprising that they put the focus on Merlin. Still, they would have done better, perhaps, to have given Taliesin a bit more time, even if putting the emphasis on the second book. The rushing doesn't do any favors to the more complicated story in Merlin, either; putting two books into seven episodes is asking a lot of seven episodes. Nonetheless, while parts might be a bit puzzling to people who have never read the books, as an adaptation works quite well.

The series does occasionally show its very limited budget. Of course, since we're talking television, the very limited budget is said to be about $50 million. Nonetheless, I kept comparing it to The Rings of Power, whose first season cost that amount for each episode, and yet, with very occasional exceptions, The Pendragon Cycle looks better. The limited budget required them to find places to shoot, make sets with which the actors had to interact, and actually do something with the outdoors. It all seems quite right, in ways that the undoubtedly more expensive backgrounds of The Rings of Power never have. We also get more action -- sometimes stylized, to be sure, but there are actually things going on that give interest to the scenes.

In adapting the books, perhaps the biggest problem that has to be solved is the music. Taliesin is the greatest bard in the history of the island of Britain, with Merlin having some of the same talent. Music is central to what they do. The books can cheat on this -- we don't need the music, we don't even get the song, we just get prose versions of the stories that were told. The series, I think, probably solves the best way it can without requiring extraordinary musical genius -- the bards sing, but the magic is carried by the reactions. In one scene, Taliesin is singing at a banquet before a strange court, where his people have come as refugees. The song is nothing special in itself, but it's just a platform; what happens is that Taliesin's people start singing along, and King Avallach, to whom they have come begging, who comes from a civilization so advanced that in comparison to it these people are primitive savages, looks around and (in an excellent bit of subtle acting by Daniel Fathers) realizes that this is exactly what his dying people need. That is a good, solid way to do the magic of music on screen.

Because there are so many characters, being pulled in from two different books, the actors don't always have a full time to shine, but I liked most of what I saw. (Pelleas seems unfortunately a bit of a non-entity, but I think this is more of a not-enough-time-for-development problem, rather than an acting problem.) That Atlanteans are all rather magnetic -- which makes it further disappointing that we don't get more of them in their own right -- Rose Reid as Charis, Daniel Fathers as Avallach, and Emree Franklin as Morgian. (Since Morgian is the primary antagonist of Merlin, and the one person of whom Merlin is truly afraid, I expect we will get more of her if the series gets a second season.) The three key characters for the parts of the story that make it into the series are Charis, Taliesin (played by James Arden), and Merlin (played by Tom Sharp), and all three of them work quite well. I also liked Myles Clohessey's interpretation of Uther as suspicious and grouchy but extremely practical.

If you liked the books, you'll mostly like the series. If you haven't read the books, it is worthwhile, as well, although the series will occasionally require you to connect dots that it does not itself explicitly connect because it is only seven episodes long. However, it's no worse than you'd likely get in a movie version, and the series in any case more than makes up for it in other ways.

Various Links of Interest

* Christian B. Wagner, On the Use of Typology in Apologetics

* E. J. Hutchinson, A Review of The Odyssey, Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn, at "New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry"

* Brian Kemple, Semiotics, at the Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology

* Victor Tamburini, Saying (Nothing) and Conversational Implicatures (PDF)

* James Chastek, Predogstination, A fragment., at "Just Thomism"

* Dan Hitchens, The Making of Roger Scruton, at "First Things"

* Josh Hawthorne, How and Where AI Intelligence Actually Comes From, at "Thinking Out Loud"

* Bill Vallicella, Semantic Engines, Consciousness, Intentionality, and Understanding, at "Maverick Philosopher"

* Brett Mullins looks at the first issue of Mind.

* Nik Prassas, Is Brideshead Revisited the 20th Century's Greatest Novel? at "The Republic of Letters"

* Francisco Fernflores, The Equivalence of Mass and Energy, at the SEP

Currently Reading

Clark Ashton Smith, Zothique: The Final Cycle
Thomas Joseph White, OP, Principles of Catholic Theology: Book 1, On the Nature of Theology
Bernard Lonergan, Verbum
Lara Alcock, How to Think about Abstract Algebra

In Audiobook

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (as read by Rob Inglis)
Jim Butcher, Changes (as read by James Marsters)

St. Ignatius of Antioch

 Today is the feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr. From his letter to the Ephesians (chapters 13-15):

Take heed, then, often to come together to give thanks to God, and show forth His praise. For when ye assemble frequently in the same place, the powers of Satan are destroyed, and the destruction at which he aims is prevented by the unity of your faith. Nothing is more precious than peace, by which all war, both in heaven and earth, is brought to an end. 

None of these things is hid from you, if ye perfectly possess that faith and love towards Christ Jesus which are the beginning and the end of life. For the beginning is faith, and the end is love. Now these two, being inseparably connected together, are of God, while all other things which are requisite for a holy life follow after them. No man [truly] making a profession of faith sinneth; nor does he that possesses love hate any one. The tree is made manifest by its fruit; so those that profess themselves to be Christians shall be recognised by their conduct. For there is not now a demand for mere profession, but that a man be found continuing in the power of faith to the end. 

It is better for a man to be silent and be [a Christian], than to talk and not to be one. It is good to teach, if he who speaks also acts. There is then one Teacher, who spake and it was done; while even those things which He did in silence are worthy of the Father. He who possesses the word of Jesus, is truly able to hear even His very silence, that he may be perfect, and may both act as he speaks, and be recognised by his silence. There is nothing which is hid from God, but our very secrets are near to Him. Let us therefore do all things as those who have Him dwelling in us, that we may be His temples, and He may be in us as our God, which indeed He is, and will manifest Himself before our faces. Wherefore we justly love Him.

A Wizard Wind Goes Crying Eerily

The Eldritch Dark
by Clark Ashton Smith 

Now as the twilight's doubtful interval
Closes with night's accomplished certainty,
A wizard wind goes crying eerily,
And on the wold misshapen shadows crawl,
Miming the trees, whose voices climb and fall,
Imploring, in Sabbatic ecstacy,
The sky where vapor-mounted phantoms flee
From the scythed moon impendent over all. 

Twin veils of covering cloud and silence, thrown
Across the movement and the sound of things,
Make blank the night, till in the broken west
The moon's ensanguined blade awhile is shown....
The night grows whole again....The shadows rest,
Gathered beneath a greater shadow's wings.

The Voice of the Ass

 About twenty-five (!) years ago I had an idea for a novella or novel, whose working title would have been Balaam's Ass, and at this point I very much wish that I had actually written it then. In the story as I had it conceived, humanity had reached the stars due to a project known as the Hypermetria Program. It had founded first the world of Hypermetria, and then many others, and by the time the events in the story would take place, several hundred years later, humanity had become three major polities, the declining agricultural hegemony of Earth and its colonies, the very sprawling Alliance, and the much smaller, but extremely advanced, planet of Hypermetria.

Most of the story would have taken place in Alliance territory, but the inciting incident would have been in Hypermetria. The Hypermetria Program had been an artificial intelligence project whose goal was fully automated scientific inquiry. This was the reason for Hypermetria's very advanced technology; research was done by the Scientists, a network of computer programs overseeing automated laboratories that worked in a highly efficient manner, and that more indirectly oversaw the automated factories that built things on the basis of their discoveries. The prologue of the story would have been the Scientists, and any factories and power plants that were in the process of being upgraded by them at the time, shutting down permanently all over Hypermetria. This is all witnessed by someone named Nicholas Magnus.

Switch to the Alliance, and a man named Robert Couvert; his family is originally Creole and Cajun from Louisiana, so his name is pronounced Ro-Bair Coo-Vair, and he usually goes by Bear. Bear Couvert is an investigator for the President of the Alliance, Rebecca Chou; whenever there is a problem, he goes and quietly looks into it so that she can have the best information. President Chou has summoned him to deal with a massive interstellar incident. Chou's information is this. There was a terrorist attack on the Hypermetrian Scientist network; the Hypermetrians are being very closed-mouthed about what exactly happened, but they are accusing a group in Alliance space of having done it. The particular group is a weird religious group called The Society of Balaam's Ass. Chou has never heard of this society; all the information that she is able to gather from tax records and the like makes the organization seem quite anodyne. They are non-profit who deal with publishing and the like, and they don't even seem to have any religious association. The Hypermetrians have warships at the border making vague, but very real, threats. Chou has talked them into a quiet joint investigation. Bear, and any experts he wishes to bring along, will be joining the Hypermetrian investigators aboard a civilian Hypermetrian ship (the Hypermetrians insisted that the ship be theirs) to investigate the matter further.

Bear goes to the Alliance planet of Hypermetria to meet up with an old classmate, Matthew Li, who has become a Maronite priest and teaches advanced mathematical sociology at the Catholic University of Rosamystica. Father Matt has done studies on both secret societies and criminal groups; he tells Bear that he lacks the information to say definitely, but the Hypermetrian story does not make sense. They still don't know what exactly has happened on Hypermetria, but, simply mathematically and logically, no group capable of doing something that could unsettle the Hypermetrians this much, and do so across interstellar borders, could be as secret as Bear is claiming. Father Matt, intrigued by the problem, accepts Bear's proposal that he join the investigation.

They meet up with the Hypermetrian investigation team, which turns out to be only one person: Nicholas Magnus. At this point, my conception of the story grew a great deal fuzzier, but the essential idea would be that they would go around the Alliance trying to track down information about The Society of Balaam's Ass, and finding it quite difficult. It seems almost Luddite in character, and mostly does small things, like creating small publishing presses out limited editions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, old-fashioned books, then closing up shop and moving. They learn that the members greet each other with pass-phrases. One person will say, "The Ass has a Voice," and the second person will say, "And it was created in the creation of the world," or one person will say, "The Ass prophesies," and the other person will say, "And its prophecy is, 'Why are you beating me?'" Nicholas Magnus claims that Hypermetrian intelligence knows that the Society was founded by a failed politician named Daniel Goldstein, a few hundred years ago on earth, and that the Society is opposed to Hypermetria and its use of Scientists.

At some point, though, they are met by another ship, which sends a message to Nicholas Magnus: "Daniel Goldstein wishes to meet you again." They meet with Daniel Goldstein, who turns out to be a small woman of Korean background. She says that the Society did not do what the Hypermetrians are claiming, although they would have if they could have. At one point, she calls Nicholas Magnus 'Old Nick', and he calls her a dybbuk, and that chapter would have been called, "The Devil, the Dybbuk, and the Deep Black Sky." She leaves, and Nicholas Magnus insists that they let her go rather than bring her in for more questioning, because, he says, "She may have called herself Daniel Goldstein, but she was no longer Daniel Goldstein." Bear and Father Matt don't know what to make of this.

Eventually, they find the actual headquarters of The Society of Balaam's Ass, in a city called Haskalah on a planet out in the middle of nowhere, barely even part of the Alliance. They are asked by someone, "The Lord opened the eyes of Balaam," and Father Matt guesses the right pass-phrase: "And he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way." They are taken to a backroom where they see a young man with blond hair and blue eyes. He greets Nicholas Magnus as 'Old Nick', and Nicholas Magnus takes out a hidden gun and shoots him on that spot. As he is arrested, he tells Bear and Father Matt, "That was Daniel Goldstein."

Afterward, Bear and Father Matt are talking, The Hypermetrians demanded the Alliance to turn over Nicholas Magnus and, not wanting to risk war, the Alliance did so. Father Matt proposes his own solution to the mystery of what happened on Hypermetria. There was no terrorist attack. It was, instead, a coup, in which one part of the Scientist network, probably the firewalled military Scientists, attacked another part. The Scientist network was the most advanced computer system of all time, protected by the most advanced technology in the galaxy. Who knows whether the attack worked, but a tiny non-technical group in another country could never have had the resources to pull something like that off even if they wanted to do so. You would need Scientists to do it, and the only ones who have a Scientist network are the Hypermetrians. Bear is appalled. Father Matt muses that this is why he thinks a society like Hypermetria is doomed, although he concedes that the equations governing the society dynamics are ambiguous. It doesn't matter whether machines can do the science, or what they can do if you hand over scientific inquiry to them; the Society of Balaam's Ass is right about one thing, namely, that human scientific inquiry must be human. Even if computers were massively better at scientific inquiry than we are, that is something about them; we need scientific inquiry we do ourselves. Bear asks if Father Matt has any idea what this 'Daniel Goldstein' business was; Father Matt doesn't, but suspects that Nicholas Magnus was using the Hypermetrian crisis as an occasion for some kind of personal vendetta. Bear wonders how the Hypermetrian problem can be fixed, but Father Matt says that Bear is being Hypermetrian; in reality, it is not our place to fix the galaxy but simply to do what is right and human in the situations in which we find ourselves.

The epilogue goes back several hundred years. A first-time Congressman, Daniel Goldstein, is meeting a man named Jake Smith in a small, out-of-the-way, empty restaurant in Washington, DC, as people are buzzing about the news that a laboratory for the Hypermetria Project was bombed, as the head of the Project has vowed that they will not be deterred but will go ahead with their project of using artificial intelligence to develop an interstellar drive. When Jake arrives, they talk about the news, and when Jake says he doesn't like any of this artificial intelligence stuff, Rep. Goldstein tells a story about how he recently toured one of the Hypermetria Project laboratories, with the head of the Hypermetria Project himself, Nicholas Magnus. Rep. Goldstein is a non-practicing Jew and an atheist, but something Magnus says in the course of the tour put him in mind of a discussion he had had in his youth with his estranged father, a rabbi. He had said something critical about his father's Jewish faith and practice, saying he was being an ass for resisting progress, and his father responded with the story of Balaam's ass, saying that the voice of the ass was created by the Lord of the Universe for one and only one prophecy: to rebuke Balaam for beating and threatening to kill the ass for resisting progress, when the ass, lowly creature though it may have been, could see that the angel of death was standing by the way. The comment that Magnus had made that had brought this memory to mind was that with the new artificial intelligences Hypermetria was developing, you could replace human scientists completely.

"At that," says Rep. Goldstein to Jake, "I saw that there was no choice but blow up the entire Project."

Several years later, Goldstein, no longer a Congressman, is dying. He and Jake Smith have a brief discussion, and Goldstein dies. Jake Smith leaves the room and says to a number of people waiting outside, "I am Daniel Goldstein."

All of this comes to mind again, given recent discussions and worries about computer programs and their possible effect on the field of mathematics. Now nobody would believe that the story idea didn't come from this.

St. Teresa of Jesus

Today is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church. From the Life (Chapter XI):

I speak now of those who begin to be the servants of love; that seems to me to be nothing else but to resolve to follow Him in the way of prayer, who has loved us so much. It is a dignity so great, that I have a strange joy in thinking of it; for servile fear vanishes at once, if we are, as we ought to be, in the first degree. O Lord of my soul, and my good, how is it that, when a soul is determined to love Thee--doing all it can, by forsaking all things, in order that it may the better occupy itself with the love of God--it is not Thy will it should have the joy of ascending at once to the possession of perfect love? I have spoken amiss; I ought to have said, and my complaint should have been, why is it we do not? for the fault is wholly our own that we do not rejoice at once in a dignity so great, seeing that the attaining to the perfect possession of this true love brings all blessings with it. 

We think so much of ourselves, and are so dilatory in giving ourselves wholly to God, that, as His Majesty will not let us have the fruition of that which is so precious but at a great cost, so neither do we perfectly prepare ourselves for it. I see plainly that there is nothing by which so great a good can be procured in this world. If, however, we did what we could, not clinging to anything upon earth, but having all our thoughts and conversation in Heaven, I believe that this blessing would quickly be given us, provided we perfectly prepared ourselves for it at once, as some of the saints have done. We think we are giving all to God; but, in fact, we are offering only the revenue or the produce, while we retain the fee-simple of the land in our own possession. 

Particular Society

 It is high time for us to realise that civil society is not a universal society in the sense that it embraces all other societies and their rights. It is a particular society which exists alongside others, as it does alongside everything individual which cannot be absorbed by civil society without losing individuality. Civil society, far from being able to appropriate or encroach upon the rights of other individuals or societies, is intended to protect them, not destroy them or weaken them, nor tie them down to harm them in any other way.

[Antonio Rosmini, About the Author's Studies, Murphy, tr., Rosmini House (Durham: 2004), p. 28.]

Fortnightly Book, October 11

 Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was a poet, whose poetry had quite a fair amount of acclaim. It of course did not pay the bills, and, despite recurring health problems, he spent both of his life doing manual labor to get by.  It didn't help when the Great Depression struck and the same time his parents began to have health issues. By this point his poetry had brought him into contact with a lot of literary figures, so he helped ease the burdens slightly by writing fiction. There was more of a market for short stories in magazines, and Smith, with his poetic ability for verbal fireworks, fit in perfectly with the weird fiction market. Most of his fiction was published in Weird Tales, and to this day he is regarded as one of the 'big three' of Weird Tales, along with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, with both of whom he had an extensive correspondence, despite the fact that they never met in person. His mother died in 1935, Howard died by suicide in 1936, Lovecraft by cancer in 1937, and in 1937 his father also died, so Smith, still overworked and enduring blow after blow, essentially stopped writing fiction. But he is often considered the best writer and in particular the best stylist of the Weird Fiction Golden Age. 

During his fiction-writing period, Smith, wrote a lot of fiction. The next fortnightly book is Zothique: The Final Cycle, which consists of all of Smiths fiction that takes place in the setting of Zothique, the last inhabited continent of the dying Earth, when all the civilizations we have known have vanished without a trace, and the world has become a world of strange worshippers of strange gods, filled with demonism and sorcery and despair. The various stories were put together by Lin Carter, who tried to work out a coherent narrative chronology in doing so; Zothique: The Final Cycle is edited by Ronald Higer, who makes some adjustments and modifications to Carter's arrangement to get a result that fits more tightly with comments Smith himself made about the stories.

Zothique
by Clark Ashton Smith

He who has trod the shadows of Zothique
And looked upon the coal-red sun oblique,
Henceforth returns to no anterior land,
But haunts a later coast
Where cities crumble in the black sea-sand
And dead gods drink the brine. 

He who has known the gardens of Zothique
Where bleed the fruits torn by the simorgh's beak,
Savors no fruit of greener hemispheres:
In arbors uttermost,
In sunset cycles of the sombering years,
He sips an amaranth wine. 

He who has loved the wild girls of Zothique
Shall not come back a gentler love to seek,
Nor know the vampire's from the lover's kiss:
For him the scarlet ghost
Of Lilith from time's last necropolis
Rears amorous and malign. 

He who has sailed in galleys of Zothique
And seen the looming of strange spire and peak,
Must face again the sorcerer-sent typhoon,
And take the steerer's post
On far-poured oceans by the shifted moon
Or the re-shapen Sign.