Astrogator's Logs

“And the madness of the crowd is an epileptic fit.”

Tom Waits, In the Colosseum

Like anyone who didn’t greet Cameron’s Avatar as The Second Coming, I received predictable responses to my review. Some brave souls were relieved to hear they were not alone in perceiving that the Emperor wore slinky glittery togs but was nevertheless drooling. The percentage of these was higher than I expected, which made me hopeful that humanity may achieve long-term survival without regressing to a resemblance of the Flintstone cartoons.

Some insisted that I didn’t get Avatar’s subtle environment- and native culture-friendly message because I’m a jaded cynic out of touch with cosmic harmonies. These are probably the same people who think that positive thinking cures cancer (addressed sharply – in both senses – by Barbara Ehrenreich in her recent book Bright-Sided). I’ll believe the authenticity of their starry-eyedness when they sell their iPods and SUVs and give the proceeds to the residents of the Pine Ridge reservation. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a few called Avatar traitorous liberal propaganda, demonstrating their terminal lack of grasp on concepts. But then, what can one expect of people who voluntarily called themselves teabaggers?

Several exhorted me to “lighten up, it’s only a movie, can’t you stop thinking and just have fun?” This demand is the traditional ploy when someone can’t marshal a real argument – which is one reason why it’s routinely used on inconveniently uppity Others (see Me Tarzan, You Ape for a longer explanation). Them I will leave to the tender ministrations of Moff’s Law, with the added footnote that it’s actually impossible to turn a brain off, short of irreversible coma or death.

Finally, which brings me to this article’s subject, the fanboys shrieked “Die, heretic scum!” Those were hilarious, particularly the ones that pointed out my total ignorance of biology and referred me to the Pandorapedia (no link to this, since I won’t promote brain softening). I was tempted to leave them to their wet fantasies in their parents’ basements. However, inchoate rage of the Incredible Hulk variety is becoming increasingly prevalent in this culture and it extends far beyond the multiplex. I’ve dubbed it the Waterworld Syndrome, because I first articulated it after watching that horrible mess – a movie only in name, but in fact a relentless audiovisual battering.

The unmistakable sign of a well-wrought book or film is that it puts us in a light trance, emphasis on “light”. We suspend disbelief, immerse ourselves in the universe unfolding before us. Yet we don’t become passive vessels. Large parts of our brain stay busy evaluating the originality and quality of the worldbuilding, the consistency of the plot, the authenticity of the dialogue and characters. If anything jolts us out of this trance, the work immediately becomes as enticing as a flaccid balloon.

Hollywood directors have decided they don’t want to work on any of these aspects. They go through perfunctory motions, relying on lazy shorthand and recycled clichés, while they put their real effort in milking profits from the lunch boxes and video games based on their movies. This is not surprising: many started and/or double as directors for television commercials. Straightforward product placement has become ever more prominent in movies, especially those aimed at younger viewers – which at this point means almost all of them. Focus groups that now routinely “pre-test” movies have removed any pretense that film making is the craft of illuminating narratives that must be told. It’s all about marketing the franchises.

But movies still need to achieve that trance, because viewers are not so zombified as to stop thinking altogether (see note about coma above). Also, directors want a movie to leave enough of an impression that people will buy the associated tchotchkes. So they resort to the Waterworld technique, which consists of arousing the fight-or-flight reflex by sensory overload. In short, they use assaultive special effects. Today’s blockbuster movies, numbingly sequelized, are members of the Doom or Wolfenstein gang, except that they enforce even more passivity than the minimal act of frantically pushing the buttons of an XBox.

The fight-or-flight reflex is an ancient survival mechanism we share with other organisms that have a complex nervous system. Once the reflex is triggered, adrenaline and cortisol spike, the heart rate goes up, the blood supply gets diverted from the viscera and brain to the muscles, glucose floods the body, thinking is suppressed and we tremble and sweat like a beaten horse. On the behavioral side, the result is anger and fear that bypass our cortex, eluding conscious control. This makes perfect sense as a prelude to action when the trigger is legitimate: if we spend too much time analyzing the possible outcomes of a tiger’s appearance, we may end up in its stomach.

Sudden loud noises, abrupt luminosity changes, rapid irregular motion and objects fast growing in your visual field are among the triggers of fight-or-flight. Sound familiar? 3-D effects that force us to constantly flinch away from looming fronds or asteroids; car chases at a speed that our eyes can barely track; explosions, in-your-face gunshots and loud percussive soundtracks that make us jump – these are the common, blunt weapons in today’s blockbuster movie arsenal, aimed to jangle and pummel our brain into reflex mode.

When fight-or-flight is triggered while someone is in a theater seat, the resulting anger and fear are not expended because there’s no action possible beyond chewing one’s popcorn faster. The stress hormones linger, and so do the emotions they arouse – displaced, unfocused, free-floating, ready for use by demagogues and charlatans. Objectively, it’s a terrific use of the misnamed reptile brain, much better than the subliminal messages they used to flash between frames in older movies. The behavioral conditioning is now integrated into the experience. And moviegoers, stunned into sullen docility, their brain chemistry cleverly subverted, increasingly expect visceral punches instead of stories, willingly collaborating in their own mental and emotional debasement.

People who crave such entertainment turn into mobs far more readily than those who demand less crude fare and will not abandon the prerogative of critical thought. The primitive worldview fostered by such abusive spectacle diverts people from trying to solve problems rationally, making it easier to belittle knowledge and expertise, cede rights and liberties and scapegoat marginalized groups and the unlucky – which by now include much of what was once the middle class.

If you think this is hyperbole, consider that Antonin Scalia used the TV show 24 as an authority for legitimizing the use of torture. The excuse that mindless entertainment relieves pressure at times of individual and collective stress is dangerous. It’s crucial to act as full humans not when times are easy, but when times are hard; when circumstances are best served by reflection, not reflex.

Images: 1st, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, South Park; 2nd, Louis Leterrier, The Incredible Hulk; 3rd, Stanley Kubrick, Clockwork Orange; 4th, John LeFrançois, Furious George.

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Traveler from afar who sailed to our shores –
ask the Sea Rose for a gift…

Most of my friends know that I write fiction.  Publication started fifteen years ago, when five of my stories (collected in the file In the Realms of Fire) appeared in After Hours, a venue pointed out by my friend and fellow writer Calvin Johnson.

Since then, in addition to writing The Biology of Star Trek and the essays here and elsewhere, I spun six novels in an alternative universe where the Minoans survive the explosion of the Thera volcano.  The saga starts in the Bronze Age and extends into the far future.  A small press is interested in the first novel in the series, Shard Songs, which gives me strong motivation to finish it.  The trouble is that the entire opus needs global editing – a full-time job that requires focus and calmness of mind.

Several friends saw parts of the saga as it unfolded.  It inspired two of them (Heather D. Oliver and Kathryn Bragg-Stella) to create the beautiful artworks that grace the site’s cover, blog logo and gallery.  However, none of it had officially seen the light of day till this August and I had serious doubts about its publication potential.  This was in part because it doesn’t fit into any category and ignores several recipes… er, rules.

In it, legends, songs, vision quests and geasa intertwine with genetic engineering, wormhole travel, planetary settlement and sapient aliens.  Some portions have multiple narrators, the cultures are not Anglosaxon and an invented language whispers through it: my version of the lost Minoan tongue.  Worse yet, in an era where dismemberments earn a work a PG rating, kudos and awards whereas glimpses of a nipple earn it an NC-17 rating and snide sniggers, my saga contains as much sex as it does war – and though it’s not romance, love is a powerful engine in it.

Then, in August, Crossed Genres accepted Dry Rivers, a brief story from the  saga that takes place in Minoan Crete.  The just-released issue 13 of Crossed Genres contains Planetfall, a much longer braid from the saga’s tapestry.  Planetfall consists of five linked stories whose human protagonists are descendants of the characters in Dry Rivers and Shard Songs.

I don’t know if any of these novels will ever get published.  But these two green shoots have given me great joy and hope.  It was my tremendous luck to have devoted friends who urged me to keep writing the saga; to meet Kay Holt and Bart Leib whose vision of Crossed Genres focused exactly on hard-to-categorize works like mine; and to enjoy the unwavering certainty of Peter Cassidy, who’s convinced that one day the entire saga will emerge from its cocoon and unfurl its wings.  Dhi kéri ten sóran, iré ketháni.

I saw District 9 yesterday.  This gory bore won an 88% rating at the Tomatometer?  As well as rave reviews from intelligent, well-educated people across the age spectrum?  Once again, as with Star Wars, I find myself wondering if I’m in a parallel universe.

After a gritty documentary-style start with an interesting premise, the film abandons all pretense of depth or subtlety and becomes a derivative, unrelenting splatterfest.  Toss Alien Nation, The Fly and Enemy Mine in a bowl, add a splash of Cry, The Beloved Country and Starship Troopers, mix a bit of E. T. and Close Encounters — not forgetting Kafka’s Metamorphosis with some Robocop dressing and a pinch of Chaplin via Wall-e… and you get an idea of what a jumble of recycled clichés District 9 is.

Coherence, scientific or any other kind, is non-existent.  The aliens are insectoid and seem to have castes differing in mental capacity, yet all appear to be male (since they reproduce by laying eggs, either females or hermaphrodites would be prominently represented or they would have a queen; and if the latter, the humans could have stopped their reproduction cycle by killing her).  They have bio-weapons that humans cannot use — yet the aliens can’t use them either until the mutating human’s genetic signature begins to match the weapons’ trigger setting. Their ship has remained stubbornly dead for twenty years, but activates instantly when the plot demands it.  The black fluid one of them creates is good for everything, from powering ships to altering DNA.  Two individuals with totally different physiologies become buddies.  There’s also the obligatory precocious tot (addressed, with numbing predictability, as “son” by “his father”).  The upper-caste aliens have completely human motives and responses.  All the humans except one are single-note stereotypes.  And the quasi-sympathetic anti-hero undergoes a Lamarckian change that’s as bogus as the uplifting life-lesson that accompanies it.

The cruelties of segregation, the plight of refugees, our treatment of Others — those are burning subjects.  So is the question of how we would interact with sentient aliens.  None of them gets real treatment here.  Instead, the film manipulates its viewers into feeling virtuous by being superficially “daring”.  District 9 is neither science fiction nor social commentary; it’s violence porn — or, as producer Peter Jackson himself called it on io9, splatstick.

“But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”  – Monique Wittig, Les Guerillères

A story of mine, Dry Rivers, just appeared in Crossed Genres. It takes place in an alternate universe in which the Minoan civilization survives the Thera eruption. Coincidentally, I recently finished a book by Dr. Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism. The author discusses how the Minoan civilization served as a mirror that reflected the social biases of the era of its discovery – particularly of its idiosyncratic excavator, Arthur Evans.

During the Bronze Age, several major civilizations blossomed contemporaneously around the Eastern Mediterranean. Many are familiar to most Westerners, if only by name – the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Hittites. But one was sui generis: the Minoans. Despite their extraordinary achievements, we know a lot less about them than we know about their neighbors. Their alphabet, Linear A, remains undeciphered. Nor do we know what language they spoke, though a few Minoan words still adorn the Greek tongue, such as thálassa (sea), lavírinthos (labyrinth, house of the double axes), hyákinthos (hyacinth) and kypárissos (cypress).

I have always been haunted and beguiled by that lost civilization. Most of my fiction, whether of the past or the future, fantasy or science fiction, involves the Minoans. Not only are they part of my biological and cultural legacy; they were also unique. Minoan art is instantly recognizable. It is possible that the Minoan civilization might have changed the flow of history, had it not been literally snuffed out by the apocalyptic explosion of the Thera (Santorini) volcano. Such was the magnitude of the catastrophe that it became a potent, defining myth that echoes down the ages, from Plato’s Timaeus to Tolkien’s Númenor: the drowning of Atlantis.

How distinctive and advanced were the Minoans? Cathy Gere argues that they were not. She suggests that the attempt to portray Minoan Crete as a pacifist, matriarchal haven of high sophistication is not supported by the archaeological evidence, but is mostly a fantasy (largely created by Evans) to act as a paregoric to a world reeling from several major wars. Gere’s style is vivacious, articulate, elegant – and she knows her history. It is also true that Evans’ reconstructions of the Knossos palatial complex and its frescoes were heavy-handed and arbitrary. And in time-honored archeological fashion, he withheld evidence and suppressed careers that contradicted his theories.

If Gere’s book were your only source on the Minoans, you would come away well informed, highly entertained and with the impression that they were just a standard variant of the Bronze Age Levantine cultural recipe. And since Linear A has not been deciphered, the Minoans cannot tell their own story. However, extensive frescoes and other artifacts that have been gradually emerging from Akrotiri, the Theran equivalent of Pompei, support major portions of Evans’ theory. Because burial under volcanic ash kept everything intact, no question of false reconstruction intrudes. The frescoes didn’t adorn palaces, but residential houses. This fact alone says something about the Minoan culture. So does the finding that the houses were multi-storied and had hot and cold running water – amenities forgotten by their successors and the rest of Europe for almost four millennia.

Even more indicative are the subjects of the frescoes: women gather saffron crocuses, boys box, crowds watch a regatta in a harbor, swallows intertwine over lilies, gazelles gambol. War is conspicuously absent – not a single battle scene, not one weapon, not even a chariot. Gods and kings, with their usual smitings, are also conspicuously absent. The focus is on nature and daily activities. This is true of all Minoan art, from frescoes to pots to seals. Too, there is a fluidity and exuberance that sets Minoan art apart from its Egyptian and Babylonian equivalents, which are oppressive with their will to power despite their beauty. And women are everywhere, always more prominent and detailed than the men, in stark contrast to their absence or subordinate status in the art of Crete’s contemporaneous neighbors.

In all other Bronze Age East Mediterranean cultures, the Great Goddess (Isis, Ishtar, Inanna) suffered dethronement at the hands of her Consort/Son. But in Crete she retained her primacy till the Mycenaeans arrived after the volcano eruption. This does not automatically imply that Minoans were matriarchal or that women enjoyed equal status in Crete. However, the scenes depicted in Minoan art suggest that women had significant rights and were active and valued participants in society. This is not surprising. Merchant and seafaring cultures are flexible and open to new ideas which they encounter willy-nilly, and Minoan Crete was both: the Egyptian, Babylonian and Hittite archives as well as the economic system deduced from the excavations indicate that the Minoan hegemony was light-handed, localized, sea-based and economic rather than military.

There is no doubt that Minoan Crete was not the utopian paradise that Evans envisioned. For one, if the Minoans had insisted on wearing only white helmets, they wouldn’t have lasted long enough to leave any legacy, wedged as they were between nations intent on empire. For another, the Minoans did have social classes: distinctions are clearly visible in the frescoes. However, it makes me happy and hopeful to think that there may have been at least one high civilization – the first one in Europe, in fact – that was not intent on conquest, enslavement and slaughter. That once perhaps there existed a people who were content to build and sail merchant ships, create ravishing art, sing harvest songs and love ballads… and gaze at the stars while sipping wine in the warm summer nights of the Aegean.

Further reading:

Introduction to Akrotiri

Minoan portal

Frescoes:

Top, “La Parisienne”, Knossos, Crete; Middle, Saffron Gatherers (detail), Akrotiri, Thera; Bottom, Antelopes (oryx), Akrotiri

— Sappho, poem fragment

I already expressed my opinion about Nisbet, Mooney and all other appeasers who insist that scientific illiteracy and resistance to science would disappear if only scientists were “nicer”.  I won’t waste more time or thought on them,  I have far more interesting things to discuss.

My multi-talented friend Kay Holt recommended the music of composer and cellist Zoë Keating.  I just finished listening to her hypnotic album Natoma.  She uses her instrument as a cello, a lyre, a drum.  The warm tones of the cello come across like a dark-hued human voice.  The pieces bring to mind the more melodious works of Philip Glass — but equally so, the elegiac yet soaring Celtic-tinged tunes in The Last of the Mohicans and Peter Gabriel’s haunting Biko, with its interweaving of Zulu drums and Highland bagpipes.

Now if only I could find Jean Langlais’ rare Suite Folklorique, an (un)holy hybrid of full-throated organ music based on Breton folksongs, I’d be ecstatic! (Update: Found it, I think… I’ll know when the CD arrives.)

Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.

W. B. Yeats, The Four Ages of Man, last stanza

Two years ago, cancer struck me out of the clear blue sky at a moment in my life when I was gathering my strength for relaunching my research. I had just received two very hard-won grants after a lapse in funding that had essentially closed down my lab. The disease was at its early stages and I was spared the agony of chemotherapy, although some after-effects of the surgery (most prominently, severe fibromyalgia) are still with me.

I now know the paralyzing fear and the overwhelming anger as the disease takes over not only your body but your mind, the once wide-open life turning suddenly into a prison, the horrifying sense of being alone, the excruciating pain and discomfort from the treatments, the abject humiliation of not being able to control even basic functions of your once perfectly-allied body, the guilt of becoming a burden to those who love you.

We all die in the end, and we all hope that we will act well when our moment comes. But such heroic stances may only be possible if we die in a manner of our own choosing and if we die quickly. The lingering diseases that our lengthened lifespan has brought us — diabetes, neurodegeneration, cancer — don’t lend themselves to such treatment. They require even greater stoicism and a different kind of bravery.

I don’t believe in gods or an afterlife. Yet perhaps the only myth that can sustain us in such circumstances is Poul Anderson’s of the Ythrian Hunter God, a story that the medieval Greeks also told in their folksongs of Dighenís Akrítas: The Hunter will always prevail. The only thing you can do is give him a good hunt, for your own honor if not for his. Keep as much of your self and your life intact as long as you can. And do what you can to be long remembered, to leave that tiny footprint in the sand that will eventually get filled and smoothed away by the tide.

‘I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself; unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’

The waves broke on the shore.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, final sentences

Top: Mads Mikkelsen as Tristan in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur; Bottom: Plaka Sands, Naxos, Greece (John Block)

… Centauri Dreams, where my friend Paul Gilster is graciously hosting my more extended take on the new Star Trek film.  I think that the mixed reactions are universal among those who loved the original Star Trek’s optimism and civility.   Here is the closing paragraph of my extended essay, to whet your appetites:

ST|| is an odd-numbered film in the series, so I’ll give it a long space tether. However, if Uhura degenerates into the Angel in the House or if the certain-to-come sequels become more generic, I will put ST|| permanently in the same category as Star Wars. Those who have read my essay on Star Wars know how dire a fate this is. And though my wrath may not equal that of Khan, if enough of my ilk get disaffected we may abandon all the old lumbering dinosaurs and manage to relaunch the real McCoy — the Firefly-class starship Serenity, with its true love of endless skies and its persistent aim to misbehave.

Ulysses, Alfred Tennyson

I just saw the Star Trek film.  Not surprisingly, it received an avalanche of good reviews (I recommend Stephanie Zacharek’s in Salon).  Though it’s far from perfect, it captures and renews the essence of its source without servility or campiness.  It’s an alternative universe fanfiction, in the best sense.  I considered Jackson’s Lord of the Rings an unexpected gift, and didn’t think I’d receive another of this kind.  Star Trek doesn’t pass the Bechdel test but, as I fervently hoped, Uhura does much more than answer phones… and much better than smooch Kirk.

This is the first time that I find myself looking forward to more of a remake.  It’s fitting and deeply, viscerally satisfying that the show which made SF mainstream and which has always stood out because of its idealism and optimism bids fair to become a potent myth for yet another generation.

Eleven years ago, Random House published my book To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek.  With the occasion of the premiere of the Star Trek reboot film and with my mind still bruised from the turgid awfulness of Battlestar Galactica, I decided to post the epilogue of my book, very lightly updated — as an antidote to blasé pseudo-sophistication and a reminder that Prometheus is humanity’s best embodiment.  My major hope for the new film is that Uhura does more than answer phones and/or smooch Kirk.

Coda:  The Infinite Frontier

A younger science than physics, biology is more linear and less exotic than its older sibling.  Whereas physics is (mostly) elegant and symmetric, biology is lunging and ungainly, bound to the material and macroscopic.  Its predictions are more specific, its theories less sweeping.  And yet, in the end, the exploration of life is the frontier that matters the most.  Life gives meaning to all elegant theories and contraptions, life is where the worlds of cosmology and ethics intersect.

Our exploration of Star Trek biology has taken us through wide and distant fields — from the underpinnings of life to the purposeful chaos of our brains; from the precise minuets of our genes to the tangled webs of our societies.

How much of the Star Trek biology is feasible?  I have to say that human immortality, psionic powers, the transporter and the universal translator are unlikely, if not impossible.  On the other hand, I do envision human genetic engineering and cloning, organ and limb regeneration, intelligent robots and immersive virtual reality — quite possibly in the near future.

Furthermore, the limitations I’ve discussed in this book only apply to earth biology.  Even within the confines of our own planet, isolated ecosystems have yielded extraordinary lifeforms — the marsupials of Australia; the flower-like tubeworms near the hot vents of the ocean depths; the bacteriophage particles which are uncannily similar to the planetary landers.  It is certain that when we finally go into space, whatever we meet will exceed our wildest imaginings.

Going beyond strictly scientific matters, I think that the accuracy of scientific details in Star Trek is almost irrelevant.  Of course, it puzzles me that a show which pays millions to principal actors and for special effects cannot hire a few grad students to vet their scripts for glaring factual errors (I bet they could even get them for free, they’d be that thrilled to participate). Nevertheless, much more vital is Star Trek’s stance toward science and the correctness of the scientific principles that it showcases.  On the latter two counts, the series has been spectacularly successful and damaging at the same time.

The most crucial positive elements of Star Trek are its overall favorable attitude towards science and its strong endorsement of the idea of exploration.  Equally important (despite frequent lapses) is the fact that the Enterprise is meant to be a large equivalent to Cousteau’s Calypso, not a space Stealth Bomber.  However, some negative elements are so strong that they almost short-circuit the bright promise of the show.

I cannot be too harsh on Star Trek, because it’s science fiction — and TV science fiction, at that.  Yet by choosing to highlight science, Star Trek has also taken on the responsibility of portraying scientific concepts and approaches accurately.  Each time Star Trek mangles an important scientific concept (such as evolution or black hole event horizons), it misleads a disproportionately large number of people.

The other trouble with Star Trek is its reluctance to showcase truly imaginative or controversial ideas and viewpoints.  Of course, the accepted wisdom of media executives who increasingly rely on repeating well-worn concepts is that controversial positions sink ratings.  So Star Trek often ignores the agonies and ecstasies of real science and the excitement of true or projected scientific discoveries, replacing them with pseudo-scientific gobbledygook more appropriate for series like The X-Files, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica.  Exciting ideas (silicon lifeforms beyond robots, parallel universes) briefly appear on Star Trek, only to sink without a trace.  This almost pathological timidity of Star Trek, which enjoys the good fortune of a dedicated following and so could easily afford to cut loose, does not bode well for its descendants or its genre.

On the other hand, technobabble and all, Star Trek fulfills a very imporant role.  It shows and endorses the value of science and technology — the only popular TV series to do so, at a time when science has lost both appeal and prestige.  With the increasing depth of each scientific field, and the burgeoning of specialized jargon, it is distressingly easy for us scientists to isolate ourselves within our small niches and forget to share the wonders of our discoveries with our fellow passengers on the starship Earth.  Despite its errors, Star Trek’s greatest contribution is that it has made us dream of possibilities, and that it has made that dream accessible to people both inside and outside science.

Scientific understanding does not strip away the mystery and grandeur of the universe; the intricate patterns only become lovelier as more and more of them appear and come into focus.  The sense of excitement and fulfillment that accompanies even the smallest scientific discovery is so great that it can only be communicated in embarrassingly emotional terms, even by Mr. Spock and Commander Data.  In the end these glimpses of the whole, not fame or riches, are the real reason why the scientists never go into the suspended animation cocoons, but stay at the starship chart tables and observation posts, watching the great galaxy wheels slowly turn, the stars ignite and darken.

Star Trek’s greatest legacy is the communication of the urge to explore, to comprehend, with its accompanying excitement and wonder.  Whatever else we find out there, beyond the shelter of our atmosphere, we may discover that thirst for knowledge may be the one characteristic common to any intelligent life we encounter in our travels.  It is with the hope of such an encounter that people throng around the transmissions from Voyager, Sojourner, CoRoT, Kepler.  And even now, contained in the sphere of expanding radio and television transmissions speeding away from Earth, Star Trek may be acting as our ambassador.

Between the approach of Valentine’s Day and recent discussions in a forum where a lot of stale sociobiological doctrines about women were put forward, I thought I’d put this up… planting a flag, as it were.

Even before hormones signaled my entry into the arena of sex, I had a sinking feeling whenever I contemplated relationships with the opposite gender. I had cause to be worried: I grew up in Greece during the sixties. At that time, the culture was as close as you could get to Islamic outside the Middle East. It approved of strong women – but its definition of female strength was endurance and constant giving. Both the Hellenic and Byzantine legacies of my people were solidly arrayed against uppity women, ready to strike, confine and prune.

So there I was, bright, science-oriented, competitive, unfeminine, demanding equal treatment, expecting my future partners to be both lovers and friends… blessed, too (or should it be cursed?) with my father’s unstinting love, as well as his frank appetites and eye for beauty in everything. Glumly contemplating the thorny path before me, I frequently complained to him for bequeathing the wrong chromosome to the zygote that produced me. A pragmatic man with a strong streak of defiant aloneness, he was unrepentant. The fourth of five brothers with no sister, he was ecstatic that his single child was a daughter to whom he could give the name of the mother they lost too early in a terrible accident – even though he had to fight with the priests, because the name was pagan (there was no separation of church and state in Greece at that time).

I took an obvious path out of my difficulties. I left Greece the moment I could, an escape made possible by a Harvard scholarship. There were other reasons to leave, granted: Greece was a military dictatorship at the time, there was no scientific research going on there to speak of… but in the back of my mind, the question of partners lay like a sleeping dragon.

The first thing I did when I arrived in Cambridge and dropped my luggage on my dorm bed was to open a bank account. The second was to visit the student health services and ask for contraceptives. Those were the halcyon days after the Pill and before AIDS, when for one brief shining moment the act of love did not come festooned with punitive legal or medical strings. The dorms were co-educational, and my experiments in the domain of love were as eager, extensive and adventurous as they were in my courses.

About thirty years and fifty men later (counting short-term encounters), I think I’m finally ready to answer Freud’s burning question: What Do Women Want? I do not purport to answer on behalf of my entire gender. But I can unequivocally say what I want in my men and to put it in a soundbite, the answer is: Snachismo.

What, do you ask, is snachismo? It is a seamless fusion of snugglability and machismo. Those of you who read excerpts of my story Spider Silk saw snachismo embodied in the Koredháni men. For those who didn’t, I will briefly explain the concept.

To avoid confusion, I should point out right away that a snacho man is entirely distinct from a Byronic demon lover, a much more common type to whom many women are fatally attracted – sometimes literally, since many in this subgroup start as Heathcliffs and end up as wife beaters. All the dark brooders found in bodice rippers, including (alas!) Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester, are not snacho. Neither are alpha males or the so-called strong silent types.

So now that we know what is not snacho, let’s see if I can give you the gist of what is. A snacho man is physically, emotionally, intellectually adult. A snacho man, unlike an alpha male, gives his primary allegiance to his partner, not to other men. He actually likes women as people and is not afraid of them as partners or lovers – which means that, in contradistinction to the Byronic brooder, he has no need to dominate or play mindgames and is neither squeamish nor a prude in bed. Nor does he consider it unmanly to laugh, cry, be affectionate or express emotions beyond just anger (using words, not grunts or fists).

These are the primary irreducible attributes of snachismo. They may sound simple and easy but apparently are not, since few men achieve them. Several secondary attributes tend to arise from these. Given the pressure on both genders to conform to social stereotyping, a snacho man is likely to be a maverick and possess an unusual measure of both bravery and dash – an untamed wildcat, not a penned cattlebeast. He is also likely to have more than one active vocation or talent, and at least one in a domain considered not traditionally masculine. So a snacho man will have aspects of the bard, the storyteller, the contrary, the sorcerer, the shaman – roles that today’s men have largely abandoned in their apparent frenetic quest to become cubicle rats.

A scholarly essay must, of course, give examples… and not surprisingly, I didn’t find obvious snacho candidates among most mainstream fiction. But I can name a few in science fiction: Dominic Harlech, aka Niki Falcon in Emma Bull’s Falcon; Radu Drac in Vonda McIntyre’s Aztecs and Superluminal; the Servitors in Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country – who turn out to be the real men, rather than the so-called Warriors. And off the top of my head, I can think of four in film: Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas) in the film version of Aeon Flux; Sam Gillen (Jean Claude van Damme, who would have thunk!) in Nowhere to Run; Rob Roy McGregor (Liam Neeson) in Rob Roy; and, of course, Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) in The Last of the Mohicans. In that film, what pinpoints him as the quintessence of snachismo is not his undemonstrative bravery, the many skills, the untameable beauty, the way he makes love (though they all help!). The unmistakable signal is when Cora takes out her musket during the ambush by the Iroquois – and instead of telling her that ladies don’t do that kind of thing, he hands her his gunpowder pouch.

So what about me? Well, thirteen years ago someone looked at me across a room. He had copper hair to his waist and the most intelligent eyes I have ever seen. A month after our meeting he showed up at my doorstep with his toothbrush and moved in. Suffice it to say that he fulfills all the attributes of snachismo, both primary and secondary… so there is hope after all.

Credit must go to Peter Cassidy for coining the term “snacho”. My thanks to Jester for pointing out that Liam Neeson as Rob Roy perfectly fit the snachismo model.

Photo Credits: Top, Cora (Madeleine Stowe) and Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) in The Last of the Mohicans. Bottom,  Aeon (Charlize Theron) and Trevor (Marton Csokas) in Aeon Flux.

— Satan in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger

I’ve been writing all my life — fiction, poetry, book reviews, essays, the (so far) lone book.  Shaping worlds of my own and opining on the worlds of others kept me sane, or at least distracted me, whenever problems in real life grew so large that sleep became impossible.  At the same time, this was not therapy.  I wrote for publication and was lucky and persistent enough to push a decent fraction of the work out into the world.

Twice only in my four decades of writing was I induced to write fanfiction.  I didn’t venture into those creatively murky waters because I was a fan.  On the contrary, the urge arose from my profound dissatisfaction with the particular original sources.  In the first case, the (justly famous) author eventually extended the trilogy that had engaged me deeply, yet had left me so oddly unfulfilled.  She crafted three sequels that were so viscerally right — and so beautiful — that my take became redundant.  In the second case, I wrote the fanfiction when I still felt angry and bereft after I had written a lengthy critique of the original.  Intrigued by the fanfic forums, I posted on several and there I got to observe the phenomenon in all its bizarre glory.

Most contemporary Americans date fanfiction since its Star Trek beginnings, but the activity started ever since language-wielding humans gathered around their campfires.  Because ancient texts were transmitted orally, they are palimpsests created by grandmothers and bards, the plots and characters constantly borrowed and modified to suit the particular audience.  Many respectable artworks are de facto fanfic of works whose copyright has expired (Milton’s Paradise Lost and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead come to mind, as does West Side Story – not to speak of Romeo and Juliet itself).

Fanfiction and fanart are both artistic enterprises and social outlets.  When I posted my story, I was only aware of the former aspect.  When I realized the extent of the latter, I felt like Richard Burton wandering through Mecca in disguise: an infidel, a farang anthropologist watching the rituals of aliens.  Each fandom, an accretion around the kernel of its inspiration, combines the custom-bound outlook of an insular tribe with the hothouse atmosphere of a girls’ boarding school.  Fanfic writers and readers get as immersed and vested in their communities as do players of World of Warcraft.

The artistic level of most fanfic is lamentable.  But then, so is most of published fiction, especially the bloated sequels increasingly expected by fantasy and SF editors, the cynical commissioned works in franchises and the copycat clones in the various specialized genres — mystery, romance, westerns.  Good fanfic is on par with published work.  Fanfiction is the contemporary equivalent of storytelling, the return of mythmaking to collective ownership, the empowering of the fans (especially female fans, who write an estimated 98% of fanfiction) from passive consumers into transgressive creators, subversive Liliths rather than subservient Eves.

The opinions of published writers on fanfiction range across the spectrum but most don’t consider it a serious competitor.  Many are flattered if they evoke fanfiction from their readers, the sign of having attained iconic status.  Yet the phrases that encapsulate their views about fanfiction show fundamental contempt for the undertaking: “the intellectual equivalent of playing with dolls” and “a safe sandbox”.  Part of the condescension undoubtedly comes from the fact that fanfiction authors do this for love or pleasure and are not paid for their labors.  It says something about today’s mindset that professional authors who also write fanfiction almost invariably attempt to hide this fact, whereas authors who write commissioned works (officially sanctioned fanfiction) admit it freely.  Nevertheless, these phrases pinpoint two serious drawbacks of fanfiction.

The first puts fanfiction in a permanent defensive mode and this is not only because of its shaky legal status.  In traditional storytelling there was no dominant “truth”, no canon.  All versions of the Border ballads were equal, distinguished only by the skill of the story weaver.  The best survived, the rest sank into the waters of Lethe.  In fanfiction there is a “master”- the creator of the original source.  All fanfiction writers are eternal apprentices even if the beauty and originality of their writing exceeds that of the source.  And because fanfiction is not formally published, it’s all slated for oblivion regardless of its quality.

The second is critical if the fanfic writer is talented.  Inhabiting someone else’s universe is inherently constricting even if the author creates rebellious alternative versions of that universe.  At the same time, the ready-made mythology invites laziness and rewards short-hand.  Using a particular name in a particular fandom is guaranteed to invoke the desired response from readers, so why bother with careful craft?  And the feedback in fanfiction, always positive, creates the potential for emotional addiction, the craving for ever more uncritical admiration.

Fanfiction is here to stay. It fulfills many needs: it grants recognition, gives access to a like-minded community, feeds dreams (or obsessions).  And the Internet is an ideal venue for it.  Too, the publishing world may well change under the overwhelming presence of the new medium.  But if mainstream publications become more receptive to a larger, more informal concept of authorship, it would be better for everyone if all that talent that now spends its creative juices on Xena, Buffy, Harry Potter and the Skywalkers were given motivations to invent original stories.

It may be true, as Dostoyevsky so famously said, that there are only two stories: “Someone goes on a journey” and “A stranger comes to town”.  Yet across eras and cultures, humans have found infinite ways of telling these two stories.  Writing fanfiction is a pleasant and constructive hobby and it can foster loyal friendships.  It takes courage to leave such a cocoon, although it inevitably suffocates what it originally nourished.  But for those who truly want to create, there are whole universes yet to be dreamt and brought forth.

The men are made tapu (sacred) while the women are left noa (common) for doing all those things at the back, like preparing and serving food. Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke, Maori noble and recorder of Maori traditions.

I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? — Sojourner Truth, at the 1851 Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio.

Curious about the scenery and forewarned about the schmaltz, I saw Luhrmann’s Australia. Like Dances with Wolves, Australia purports to express enlightened attitudes towards indigenous people. In both films, the good guys (and gals) go native; the directors condemn the casual, brutal racism of the eras they portray; and they show the indigenous people as possessing spiritual attributes vastly superior to those of their white supplanters.

In fact, these movies and their relatives shift the emphasis in “noble savage” from savage to noble but keep the condescension intact, leaving films such as The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Black Robe, Smoke Signals, Rabbit-Proof Fence and Frozen River to do the real heavy lifting. However, Australia reminded me of an uncomfortable issue ignored or glossed over in both the real and virtual world: the treatment of native women by their own men.

In Australia, the grandfather of the young mixed-race protagonist looks after his grandson’s welfare by protecting him from enemies and dangers. The grandfather appears to possess magic powers that allow him to turn invisible, charm animals, travel faster on foot than whites do by car, unerringly find his way under any circumstances and in all terrains, show up whenever the boy truly needs him, and kill more efficiently with a spear than others can with a gun.

Yet the same powerful shaman lets his daughter die a gruesome, lingering death by drowning as she struggles to hide her child from the authorities that would take him to a mission school. She is a vessel for continuation, not of intrinsic worth in herself: Her father never taught his daughter to Sing or Dream, precious cultural knowledge that he’s eagerly imparting to his grandson to keep him grounded and connected to his people.

Hollywood films kill off mothers with distressing frequency, presumably so that the heroes won’t run the horrible danger of getting contaminated by excessive contact with women (aka girl cooties). But given the impact that films have on society, the positions in these films pose specific dangers to both native cultures and the relationships between them and those of the West with which they coexist. Letting the young protagonist’s mother die without a shrug — or any visible effect on him — allows film-makers and audience to ignore her cruelly inequitable treatment as the stuff of cultural fabric, unquestionable in its wisdom and perfection borne of pre-lapsarian, pre-contact mores and traditions.

Many argue that women’s position in indigenous cultures was enviable before the extreme dislocation brought on by genocide and subsequent disenfranchisement and marginalization. Yet the cultural norms prior to the arrival of colonialists with their guns and germs were a far cry from the idyll that revisionist Western directors portray. Even more tragically, the deracination brought on by the carnage of conquest gave the male survivors of the cultures a reason to grimly hang on to the least humane aspect of what defined them as men: brute dominance over those who could neither resist nor leave — namely, their women.

When the social pendulum swung from automatically denigrating native cultures to admiring them almost uncritically, the embracing was done primarily by men following the drumbeats of Robert Bly. And there is much to envy from the viewpoint of a cubicle drone, if he is male: Native men went on vision quests, hunting parties, raids. They had the privileges of carrying weapons, having initiation ceremonies, enjoying sweat lodges, speaking up in council, becoming war or peace chiefs.

While the men played, the women toiled at all the repetitious, semi-invisible tasks that keep the sun rising each morning: they raised the children, cared for the elderly, constructed the dwellings, collected the “gathering” portion of the victuals, prepared the food and clothing, cleaned up after everyone, alive or dead. They invariably ate last and least, and the most nutritious foods were forbidden to them: bananas in Polynesia, cocoa in Mesoamerica.

And if a hostile party raided, the women’s lack of weapons didn’t spare them. Women were booty — but unlike valuable livestock, they were often killed either outright or by extreme mistreatment during captivity, after the routine of being raped and witnessing the butchery of their children. In all fairness, that was also their fate in the supposedly chivalric West unless they were noble and/or rich enough to merit ransom.

The revisionist attitude, part guilt, part geopolitical convenience, part belated recognition, has resulted in “respecting traditions” by tolerating inhumanity against women in non-Western cultures — even allowing enforcement of separate, regressive family, education and healthcare laws in non-Western communities embedded within Western societies. People are called imperialists if they dare decry genital mutilation, stonings, forced marriages, honor killings. Had this viewpoint been adopted a century ago, footbinding and suttee would still be with us (though the latter continues indirectly as bride burnings).

If the West is responsible for the deracination and corruption of native cultures into caricatures of their former selves, then it must also take responsibility for the fossilized versions of the gender relations its interference allowed to persist. And if Western art wants to investigate the stories of indigenous women with verisimilitude and integrity, it owes them the respect of animating their narrative to a degree that the audience can appreciate their plight as well as their strength.

Women’s oppressed status in Western and native cultures is not going to be cured by the cinema. But one thing is certain. Filmmakers don’t do any favors to indigenous women or what is left of their cultures by depicting them either as disposable props or as immersed in unquestioning bovine pre-lapsarian bliss.

Credits: Top, Molly (Everlyn Sampi) and Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) in Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence. Bottom, Lila (Misty Upham) and Ray (Melissa Leo) in Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River.

During the last week of September, I participated in the Viable Paradise writing workshop at Martha’s Vineyard. That time of year is ideal for the Cape: no bustling crowds, everything bathed in that saturated golden light unique to fall in New England. The crickets are in full cry, the night sky is adorned with both the summer and winter major constellations. Day by day, the sea turns to gunmetal silver, the salt marsh to beaten bronze.

The workshop itself was interesting, in terms of the writing as well as the social experience. I will comment on one aspect of it here: Almost all the work that I read took place either in the near-future United States or Victorian England. There wasn’t a single space opera or a truly exotic setting in the lot — on earth, let alone off-planet. In some cases, the setting worked well in service of the story’s central kernel. However, it’s very hard to make things look new if the setting is so well-worn.

The standard advice given to writers is “write what you know” (although it’s unclear how that fits with FTL, aliens or nanobots). Writers of speculative fiction might want to venture a little further afield. It seems to me that such travels would nurture the authors’ creative spirit and would also help the readers become receptive to more than iterations of Tolkien and Sterling.

In this time and place, poetry has been assigned a month, like other marginalized causes. I grew up in a culture where poetry was not precious and hermetic, but a vital way of expression that belonged to all. Poems were set to music and sung, poets were bards that could fuel revolutions. They, and the satirists, were the first to be exiled or imprisoned by oppressive governments.

I have too many favorite poems. The one I finally decided to post here comes from a Greek of the diaspora, a cosmopolitan and polyglot, who spent most of his life in Alexandria. He lived in self-chosen obscurity, but his power and influence have only grown with time.

The God Abandons Antony

by Konstantinos Kavafis

When abruptly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession pass by
with delightful music, and voices,
don’t grieve for your failing fortunes,
your spoiled deeds, the illusion of
your life’s plan; to mourn is useless.
Rather, with foreknowledge and boldness,
bid farewell to the Alexandria that’s departing.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t claim
it was just a dream, that you heard a lie;
avoid all such futile notions.
As if long prepared, and ever courageous,
acting as one who deserves such a city,
make your way to the window,
and listen closely with your heart, not
with cowardly pleas and protests;
hear, as a last pleasure, those sounds,
the delightful music of the invisible procession,
and bid farewell to the Alexandria you are losing.

Translated by Stratis Haviaras

The panel portrait is one of many found in the Fayum Basin of Egypt, dating from 1 BC to 3 AD.

Edo-period katana and Ainu tonkori (fretless zither)

When I was a child, among the highlights of my life were my visits to the tiny neoclassical building where my father’s stepmother (the only grandparent I ever got to know) was spending her autumnal years. At the center of its courtyard was a dried fountain where I launched a thousand imaginary ships. The house was an Aladdin’s cave of nooks and crannies, doors with panels of etched glass, clouded mirrors, boxes that held feather boas and yellowing photographs. Its guardian was a cat as fastidious and dignified as my grandmother.

In the evenings, my grandmother unfolded tapestries of stories while she cooked sophisticated dishes. A diaspora Hellene, born in Bulgaria of parents who fled Asia Minor, she was one of the first women to become a teacher in early 20th century Greece. On top of this scrumptious cake was a tart, sweet cherry: a nearby movie theater dedicated exclusively to cartoons. The fare was mostly Warner and Disney. I watched ecstatically the occasional avant-garde short from the Eastern block, whenever a “centrist” government made the censors relax their grip.

Then one time I saw something so different that I almost forgot to exhale while I watched it. For one, it was as long as a “real” film. The plot demanded attention, the characters engaged and compelled. There was derring-do; conflicted loyalties and betrayals; a doomed romance. Even more distinctive was the style: dynamic, fluid, sophisticated, with a distinct edge lacking from the sugary American cartoons. I never forgot it, nor saw anything like it again — until I came to the United States and found out the name of the genre. Somehow, a Japanese anime film had meandered into that tiny Athenian movie house on the afternoon that I happened to attend.

I have seen a good deal of anime since then, including the classics (Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop). The combination of animation with adult themes is totally un-American, resembling the unexpurgated European fairytales before they got sanitized for “safe” consumption by children. However, I’m neither an expert nor an aficionado of the genre. Anime contains too much violence and too little sex for my taste and the gender stereotyping in most of it is disturbingly reminiscent of sixties sitcoms. Too, like the vast majority of comics and films across cultures, most anime is obsessed with maintaining proper order, safeguarding boundaries, battling monochromatically defined evil — and if saving the universe requires balletic decapitations, so much the better.

Exported anime is skewed towards what the Japanese assume Americans will find interesting, including plots and characters recycled from Western comics — very much like the late 19th century faux-exotic tchotchkes produced in Japan exclusively for gaijin consumption. There is a fascinating double distortion here: Americans watch what they think are true Japanese cultural products, while the Japanese have jiggled the content to make it palatable to outsiders, who miss most of the subtler cultural clues that are unavoidably embedded in the narratives.

But a few anime have been branded into my awareness as deeply as that nameless one I saw as a child: Mononoke Hime, Howl’s Castle and four arcs of Samurai Champloo: Misguided Miscreants, Lullabies of the Lost Verse, Elegy of Entrapment and Evanescent Encounter. Like the samisen and tonkori chords that haunt the Champloo arcs, these pluck almost painfully at my heart. And like Theseus in the Labyrinth, I decided to follow this Ariathne’s thread to the center.

At first glance, the three works make a grouping as unlikely as the Champloo protagonists. Howl’s Castle is a cultural hybrid, based on a novel by Diana Wynne Jones. Samurai Champloo (as its name denotes) mixes eras and styles with unrepentant brio. Mononoke Hime is sui generis — a dark myth of sundering that is probably as disquieting to Easterners as it is to Westerners. They do share the large commonalities obligatory in the quest genre, from the Argonauts to Firefly: the chosen family created by misfits and outsiders, the defiance of oppressive social customs, the search for a larger meaning.

So what makes these three anime different? For one, they seethe with feisty, non-demure women — in fact, the women are the engines that move these worlds: the men often just react to the women or bounce off each other, whereas (in sharp contrast to the norm) it is the women who create the fellowships and launch the quests.

At the same time, all three reject the black-versus-white divisions of most comics. There is no absolute evil in the stories, only different (often irreconcilable) points of view. They show the viewpoints of the forgotten, the marginalized, the lost: the heroine of Howl’s Castle is an old woman. In Mononoke Hime, all sides harbor outcasts of different sorts. One of the Champloo protagonists is Okinawan, and in one arc the main character is an Ainu whose village was destroyed by the Shogunate’s representatives. Both these cultures were “normalized” out of existence by the Japanese, their fates closely parallel to those of the American Indian nations.

The refusal to categorize goes beyond good versus evil. These works are truly animist in their seamless fusion of realms usually kept separate: reality and dreamscape, the mundane and the spiritual, comedy and tragedy. And at the end, they have real endings: separations, irreversible losses, deaths. Hence their searing impact upon the mind and the heart. Other anime are stylishly gothic, or fashionably cyberpunk — or merely gorefests, albeit sophisticated ones. Mononoke Hime, Howl’s Castle and Samurai Champloo break the mould of the anime genre, just like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials decisively redefined young adult fantasy.

Prologue: After each bout of grant writing, there is a burst of cleaning. And so it came to pass that while neatening my computer I bumped into this article, which I wrote in 1988. What gave me a start was that essentially nothing has changed since then! The essay, edited for the blog, contains seeds that grew into trees – most prominently my Strange Horizons article, We Must Love One Another or Die (not to mention the Snachismo essay or the still-unpublished stories).

The Asymptotic Approach

Critics vaulted over each other trying to name all the sources that Lucas plundered in Willow. Trite, predictable, uneven, derivative, was the collective conclusion. So why am I discussing this film? Because buried underneath the rubble lurks a protofeminist fable – as much as that is possible in a Hollywood film.

It has been one of my greatest, lasting disappointments that in his Star Wars trilogy, with unlimited possibilities for recasting an ancient myth, Lucas chose the most pedestrian solutions (despite the glittering special effects). The films had a single, half-hearted, heroine: An untrained Jedi, ignorant of her powers and dependent on that old female cliché, intuition. At a loss what to do with the excess males, Lucas opted for the tame approach of making one her brother, another her father. Anything wrong with polyandry, in a galaxy so far away?

The worst offense, of course, was that all the wizard/teacher figures were men, too. It makes you wonder: who raised these children and taught them to be human, before training them for galactic knighthood? Willow is a stripped, down-to-earth version of Star Wars, and as such intrinsically inferior. But it does answer some of the questions left unanswered in the trilogy.

Despite its glaring weaknesses, Willow has one overwhelming attraction for me: it takes place in a matriarchy. The king (I am using male nouns on purpose here), Bavmorda, is a woman; the prince, Sorsha, is a woman; the wizard, Fin Raziel, is a woman; and the heir to the throne, around whom the entire action rages, is a girl, Elora. There is a conspicuous absence of fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, a reversal of the customary demographic in stories and films. Women interact, form and break alliances. Too, there is a subtle but discernible resemblance among Raziel, Sorsha and Elora – feisty, angular dark-eyed redheads, not the usual cute, helpless curvaceous blondes.

Well, you say, but the female king is evil, a stereotype. Perhaps, but she is powerful; she vanquishes an entire army without any help from either her ineffectual priests or her blustering but formidable general, whom she slaps around routinely. The benign sorceress is equally powerful and, even more amazingly, she is old! A beautiful, austere woman whose wrinkles add to her character and who, incidentally, is shown practically naked without losing a shred of dignity. Sorsha is a great warrior, the commander of her mother’s armies. If she defies her mother, it is to side with another woman’s cause – and she undergoes the internal growth and maturation cycle usually reserved only for the young men in quest tales.

What about the men – the title character, Willow, and the rogue warrior, Madmartigan? Willow is an androgynous character, with particular emphasis laid on his compassion and sense of community. He is shown more than once changing the future ruler’s diapers. Madmartigan wins Sorsha only by proving his loyalty, with much attendant danger to life and limb and after abandoning the cynical loner stance. More to the point, his children will not automatically inherit the ruler’s seat; it goes to the chosen heir of the women kings.

In short, Willow contains the three telltale signs of a society where women hold real power. In decreasing order of importance, descent is matrilinear, division of labor is diffuse and the men tend to be show-off peacocks. If women are the rulers and teachers, work and roles associated with the gender are respected and desirable. And if women are the brains, men have to cultivate looks, wit and prowess. How else are they going to be noticed by the ruler and chosen for royal stud? At the climax of the film, while the men are hacking at each other down at the courtyard, doing gruntwork, the women are up at the tower, hurling thunderbolts around. By the time the warriors enter the turret, the battle has been waged and won by women’s magic.

I am not arguing that Willow is anywhere near perfection, although I enjoyed it. I am merely suggesting that, things in Hollywood and in our culture being as they are, this may be the closest approximation to woman-friendly mythology that we will get on mainstream film. I strongly recommend that women filmmakers explore the sf/fantasy genre and create the Star Wars equivalent. The formative influence of such films on young people weaned on visual spectacles and bereft of real myths cannot be overestimated.

Photo: Lioness in front of Sunset, 2001, by Thomas R. Wilke

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”

Roy Batty, in Blade Runner

In my college junior year, I took two semesters of archeology. Anti-diffusionism was the correct stance in the discipline back then. According to this doctrine, every new thought, every invention arose locally and independently. To say otherwise smacked of cultural imperialism.

Being a lifelong contrary, in my term paper for the first semester I described how Alexander the Great spread Greek culture and language from Siwah to Samarkand (the professors were good sports — they gave me an A). The local cultures were transformed by this influence and in turn transmuted it into such pinnacles as the Gandharan Graeco-Buddhist sculptures and Aristarchus’ heliocentric universe. Alexander’s achievements stayed indelibly in my memory. Having left my own culture, I also sympathized with the double vision he acquired as he observed other ways of living and thinking.

So I was curious to find out how Oliver Stone would handle a figure that fiction editors would reject as entirely unrealistic, except perhaps in superhero cartoons. After I saw the film (and even more so after I saw Revisited, its final version) I was puzzled by the spate of poisonous reviews it received, especially when compared to such clunkers as Troy, Apocalypto and 300. Granted, it was uneven, self-conscious, as subtle as a club and adolescently coy about Alexander’s bisexuality, a norm for most aristocratic warrior cultures throughout history. It also gave absurdly contemporary motivations — coupled with tone-deaf dialogue — to people who would have scoffed at Freud and recovery programs.

Yet the film had two unusual features that turned it into “something rich and strange”. One was its relative accuracy (with the glaring exception of the Hydaspes battle which Alexander won, as he did all his battles). But Stone got something else unexpectedly right: the ineffable yearning that distinguished Alexander from all other so-called conquerors.

There were two scenes in particular that gave me the unmistakable frisson of a brush with a fundamental. One came when Alexander stood at a Hindu Kush pass looking down on an endless sea of glittering snowy peaks, gazing east towards Mongolia and China — lands that were then known, if at all, as fables. The other came when the Sogdian women were whirling before him on dark red rugs, part Hindu apsaras, part Altaic shamans. The details of the dance were undoubtedly incorrect. Yet it plucked a deep chord, this visual shorthand of the new paths opened by Alexander’s passing, like the filaments of a nebula created by a nova explosion.

Alexander was one of T. E. Lawrence’s “dreamers of the day”. He had the charisma and great appetites of the extravagantly gifted. At heart he was an avid explorer who wanted to reach the end of the world. As an Iron Age king with an army, he pursued his quest conventionally, by engaging a convenient enemy. Yet he kept no plunder for himself, brought a bevy of scientists wherever he went, and was so receptive to the cultures he encountered that he angered his Macedonians, who preferred the rape-and-pillage approach. Characteristically, a sudden longing prompted his marriage to Roxanne and he wanted to leave not a dynasty but an immortal legacy.

With his ardent wish to excel, his denial of limitations, his thirst to know what was beyond the horizon, Alexander was the quintessential Westerner: ever seeking, never satisfied. No wonder his men rebelled when his goals exceeded their fixed mental boundaries, despite the marvels that they got to see because of his insatiable roaming. It is ironic that he went east, into cultures that were not only immobilized by their sophistication but also less defiant than the one which imbued him with the values that determined his trajectory.

It would be a cliché to conclude that hubris was Alexander’s nemesis. Stone identifies the real culprit by having Ptolemy say, “The dreamers exhaust us. They must die before they kill us with their blasted dreams.” Alexander’s killers were the increasing loneliness that engulfs a visionary who has the wrong context for his vision; the sense of failure that eventually overwhelms a romantic who can never achieve enough; and the uncritical adoration and hatred that focus like laser beams on extraordinary people, leading to loss of perspective and extremes.

Alexander was a brilliant strategist, a phenomenally brave warrior, a magnetic leader who led by example. He also seemed profoundly aware that the world held endless wonders and possibilities. The universe was his true home. And the universe is too vast and lonely, unless you have like-minded companions on the journey to keep you sane. Had Alexander lived and gone west as he intended, he would have fitted well among the fierce, demon-ridden Celts and Norse who understood larger-than-life figures. I see him crossing the Atlantic, taking an Iroquois mate and following the sun — to the Plains people, whose vision quests were kin to his own; to Japan, perhaps already obsessed with notions of honor as Homeric as his.

In Greek lore, Alexander’s sister turned into a mermaid when she heard of his death. She got hold of ships and asked their crews, “Does Alexander live?” Wise sailors replied in the affirmative. Within ten years Alexander changed the world in ways that still reverberate today. By trying to live like a legend, he became one — the exemplar of the human spirit that bursts through its perishable frame as it reaches for the ever-beyond: our blessing and our curse.

——-

Iskander (Persian): Alexander

Khan Tengri (Uighur): Lord of the Skies; also the name of the most impressive peak of the Tengri Tagh (Tien Shan) range, the farthest northeastern point that Alexander reached.

Art images: Skymountain courtesy of NASA archives
Bust of Alexander by Leochares (Acropolis Museum)
High Caucasus photo by Vladimir Kobilov

Remedios Varo: Creation of the Birds

Like all art, writing places harsh and divergent demands on the writer. We first have to sit for long stretches in a silent, empty room, and there struggle with the work like Jacob with his angel. Then we must step back, examine our creation dispassionately, and ruthlessly alter whatever we think falls short. To venture into the wider world, we are required to do work that has little to do with inspiration, although it, too, requires passion. We must write proposals, send letters, find agents, listen to criticism and adapt both our expectations and the work in response to it. And if we manage to navigate through all these shoals, we must be prepared for a significant portion of readers to dislike our work.

Until the early 20th century most authors paid to have their works printed or printed them on their own small presses. In other words, such luminaries as the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf would be considered “vanity authors” by today’s definition. Now, with the advent of e-books, print on demand and online publications, the boundaries are starting to blur and shift again. At the same time, both writers and readers are getting increasingly isolated in non-overlapping online universes dedicated to smaller and smaller subgenres.

Given these circumstances, what defines a writer? I have read informal writing that is of better quality than published works. Also, given the atomization of today’s readership, few writers can make a living exclusively on their writing unless they are recognized geniuses or can write very fast (there is, too, the occasional random lucky hit of a best-seller). The traditional advice to aspiring writers — found once in private letters, now in public livejournals — is to keep writing, no matter what. Unquestionably, writing is among the most creative and constructive hobbies. However, I noticed that these exhortations tend to come from people who are already published in official venues and/or have independent incomes.

After giving the matter a good deal of thought, I concluded that a writer is someone who writes with the goal of publication. Amusingly, two formidable institutions, the IRS and the NIH (National Institute of Health), agree with me. The IRS allows deduction of writing-related expenses if the writer can show that s/he attempted to publish the work, regardless of success. The NIH (and all agencies that fund research) allow investigators to list only published works on their grants. The Brontë sisters agreed as well: unworldly though they were deemed to be, they mailed their stories to London publishers the moment they completed them.

Publication rarely brings fame and fortune, especially in today’s climate of soundbites and short attention spans. Its major boon is that it takes us out of the lonely room where we stretch ourselves on racks of agony and ecstasy, out of the tiny ponds where social interactions overwhelm the primary objective of writing. It gives us perspective, it keeps us grounded. And it allows us to consider a particular work finished — finished enough to let go, like a child that grew up and finally left home.