The center of the Milky Way

A stunning, hugely informative new composite image from the Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra observatories. There is a whole heck of a lot going on in our galactic center, including a super-massive black hole.

This makes me think, again, about the Wow Signal. It came from the Sagittarius region, which is kinda, pretty much, where the black hole is. Those things emit scads of energy.

Like the tag says, Extremely Amateur Astronomy. Please consult Phil Plait (who mentions nothing about the WS) for expertise.

The Wow Signal

So here's how one learns new / old information in the age of the Internet. Inspired by this beautiful Sagan / Hawking mashup, Trev and I re-watched our 25th Anniversary Cosmos DVDs. When we got to the segment on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Trev moseyed over to the SETI site and found this tidbit about a thing called the Wow Signal. Turns out that in 1977 a researcher at Ohio State detected, via OSU's radio telescope Big Ear, a strong signal that bore several key indications of extraterrestrial and artificial origin. He was so impressed he wrote "Wow!" next to the code on the printout. Many attempts, over many years, to detect this signal again have failed. So it could well be some kind of anomolous, natural energy burst. Besides, if aliens were trying to contact us, why wouldn't they repeat the signal?

Well, in 1974, the Arecibo Observatory zapped a message out toward M13 (which will take 25,000 years to get there). And they only did it once.

Note: the Wow Signal is also the name of a band.

Borrowed Fire: Moby Dick: What is life?

Into the home stretch with Moby Dick...and I'm struck this week by how much the book has to say about characterization. Although if I'd taught it in my "Imitation of Life" class, I don't know if we would have had room for anything else (especially on the quarter system). Perhaps I'll use excerpts in the future. Anyhow, last week, I suggested that Ishmael, as a semi-embodied character /narrator, or an embodied (dis)-embodied (oh, post-structuralism, will you never release my brain from your tentacles?) narrator-device thingamajig...here's the point: "Ishmael" is a fundamentally different kind of character than Starbuck, say, or Ahab. The name "Ishmael" does not represent something that we would ever mistake for a living person. This week, we discover that Ahab is the opposite of Ishmael in this sense: Ahab--so he claims anyway--is life itself.

We learn this during a thunderstorm right out of a Gothic novel, with the ship as the lonely castle, complete with the looming forms of scary black men (the harpooneers), their teeth and tattoos illuminated by lightning. Ahab pops up on deck to do his Victor Frankenstein impersonation.

"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whenceso'er I came; whereso'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee."

[Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them.]

"I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now do I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!"

The Frankenstein parallels here are really quite interesting, though they are not actually my focus in this post. Maybe another time I'll talk about the business of breathing life / fire into one's "child," the "unbegotten," and who makes whom. I guess this indirectly bears on my point, though, which I will now get to.

In "Imitation of Life," I wanted to ask how authors portray life itself. Not how they create verbal imitations of "living beings," but life--"the life force," if you must. It seems to me that Ahab, here, provides a pretty good answer. The force becomes evident in contrast, in defiance, especially against overwhelming power. Life comes through, even comes into being, in opposition to this book's conception of God: "I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here." Personality--life--comes into relief in the face of impersonal, incomprehensible power. The conflict makes Ahab mad, and it's his rage that makes him more vividly alive than any of the other characters. Rage distills him. We feel Ahab's full commitment to his quest; his racing pulse, his bulging neck tendons as he yells, the pain that (we learn elsewhere) still surges through his phantom leg. And he makes a convincing case here that the best way to worship an indifferent God is to defy him. If God gives us life, the way to accept that gift--to live most fully--is to resist the implacable force to the end of our days. Ahab resembles Milton's Satan, a far more compelling character than God.

Anyway, if you're worried that your characters seem a little "dead," try giving them an overwhelming force to defy. Hopeless rage gives them energy, and also makes them seem both honest and brave.

Borrowed Fire: Moby Dick: What is Ishmael?

This week in Moby Dick, we are given something like an answer to a nagging question. What is the deal with Ishmael? Up until now, I've mainly considered him as a Nick Carraway-style narrator, an actual person who's present at the events he's relating, though more observer than participant. However, in the history-and-anatomy-of-whaling passages, one senses a different narrative voice, an old guy hunched over dusty tomes who might as well be Melville, or "Melville"--since Ishmael mentions, in passing or possibly in jest, that he's "unlettered." So far I've fudged the matter, calling the narrator Melville / Ishmael, or dismissing the question in favor of the larger problems of the moment. But in "A Bower in the Arsacides," we are forced to confront the issue.

Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it behoves me now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his unconditional skeleton.

But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.

Ishmael goes on to say, in his defense, that he once dissected a young sperm whale that was hoisted onto the deck. But this hardly seems to explain the vast scope of his knowledge, as he clearly recognizes. In fact, he seems to toss this whale "cub" at us as a joke and a tease--how do you know so much about the world? Well, I saw a NOVA special once. The teasing, for that's what I think this is, goes on. "And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their gigantic, full-grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsicides." Apparently on a visit to this island, Ishmael toured the complete skeleton of a whale that had washed up on shore. The skeleton (like Pip) has undergone a wondrous transformation:

The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles.

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!--pause!--one word!-- whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!--stay thy hand!-- but one single word with thee! Nay--the shuttle flies-- the figures float from forth the loom; the fresher-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.

For all I know such a "bower" does exist, but the way Melville / Ishmael describes it, it's anything but real. Yet it is here, amid enchantment and divine mystery, that Ishmael proposes to undertake that most rational of activities, measuring the whale's skeleton for his future readers' edification. The priests object--"Dar'st thou measure this our god! That's for us"--but Ishmael takes advantage of a comical skirmish among them to complete his task. OK, maybe even now, we still believe him. But then there's this, at the end of the chapter:

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing-- at least, what untattooed parts might remain--I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.

Now Melville's just having us on. We can no longer be expected to believe that Ishmael's an ordinary person. Of course, no one on the Pequod is, as our narrator is at great pains to tell us (the blacksmith, the carpenter, the deranged drowned child who's still alive--every character has a bizarre tale). But Ishmael is something else entirely--a blank page who wanders through the book "composing" himself at will. Sometimes he looks rather like a person; sometimes he sounds like one voice or another. Like the whale, the narrator's "exposed" in this passage, and also hidden. We think we see the apparatus that keeps him together, but the trees are waving, the light is flashing, and Ishmael vanishes in a magical, joking blur. You can call him Ishmael, but that container really does not hold him.

Jonathan Culler's article "Omniscience" takes on the problem of what the so-called "all-seeing" narrator is. How embodied does a narrator have to be--how present? How much of a person can a narrator be, before real human limitations get in the way of telling the story? These can be tough questions for writers to solve. Melville's solution is to have Ishmael appear and disappear as a character, and call his own reality into question. This gives Melville the option of showing the thrilling, and often deeply moving personal experiences on board the whale boat, as one can do with a conventional first-person narrator; at the same time, Ishmael can go anywhere and see anything. Who went down to the depths with Pip's immortal soul and saw, with Pip, God's foot upon the treadle of the loom? Well, Ishmael did. He can do that. This is Nick Carraway as a ghost, or demon.

Get over yourself, English major! But not completely

An interesting discussion is going on over at Nathan Bransford's blog. Bransford's an agent, and he wrote a post on Tuesday reminding all of us English major types that when we write query letters, we need to Knock Off the Analysis Already. Agents don't want to read queries that talk about all the high falutin themes (love, loss, evil, capitalism) you "explore." They want to know what happens in your story. The plot. Even if your book is literary. So, I knew that, but I do need to be whacked with that reminder now and then.

But then a bunch of commenters wrote in to say that they *only* wanted to be storytellers, entertainers, light fun fluff-makers, and anyone who deals in themes at all is a pompous ass (I paraphrase). So Bransford has written another post re: no, literature is not really that democratic, and trying new, difficult stuff is good. Only, sometimes, really tough stuff doesn't sell. It's the usual problem. You are most lucky if you are good at writing gripping plots that just naturally throw off sparks of meaning as they barrel forward. If your gifts and / or ambitions are more complicated, then you have some choices to make.

Borrowed Fire: Moby Dick: The Castaway

So after several more gruesome whale slaughters, gruesome diggings around in dead whale's bodies, gruesome (although bizarrely, darkly funny) accidents in which a harpooneer falls into the head of a whale carcass that he's emptying out, and lots of whale anatomy lessons, I have arrived at what is probably my favorite passage in the whole book. People, Moby Dick is not a walk in the park! It challenges the head, heart, and stomach all at once! But I forge ahead because literature is ennobling, and because just as I'm about to give up, another stunning passage comes along.

"The Castaway" is another small story about a literally small character, which focuses the novel's cruelty and beauty to an unforgettable point. I am talking about the story of Pip, the African American child who's found himself on board the Pequod and has lately been pressed into service on the whale boats. Lowering for whales being, as we've seen, an alarming experience, Pip develops a tendency to jump out of the boat at the wrong moment. Stubb tells him that the next time he does that, they will leave him behind.

But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day! the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb's inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea-- mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

I will leave it to others to work through the multiple layers of Melville's lyrical racism--though that racism is part of this chapter's poignance. Pip, here, is Everyman and Other at the same time; I suspect a white child in the sea would not have generated the same creative dissonance for Melville. But just picture this: "the intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity"! Who indeed can tell it? Then comes this:

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

Like the slaughtered whales, Pip is both ruined and deified. I can't decide whether to mourn or celebrate Pip's apparent insanity; in Melville's increasingly carnivalesque world, we're often doing both at once. Maybe his ascension by descension is supposed to be recompense for Stubb's (and Melville's?) cruelty to him--though Melville tells us that Stubb never meant to leave him out in the water for so long. In any case, this vision of Pip's sea change is visually and aurally beautiful. The road to hell may be paved with adverbs, as Stephen King has said, but has there ever been a better-chosen adverb than "jeeringly" here? Also, there's an amazing rhythm and alliteration to the whole passage. Just for instance: "He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it..."

So (as we land with a thud back in our practical world, in which we must extract a useful lesson from our reading), what can other writers learn from this passage? Well, the matter of "compensation" can be an interesting one to explore--a character who experiences terror or alienation or loss receives (courtesy of the author) some kind of surprising compensatory gift. (This gift may be better for the narrative than for the character himself.) Also, the excellent adverb is a ticket to heaven. Also, Pip saw God, or at least part of him, when his soul traveled to the depths.* So, writers, where do you think God resides (at the bottom of the ocean)? What's around him (coral insects)? What is God doing (weaving)? You don't have to worry about what God actually looks like if you build a convincing and amazing world around him.

*Again, Melville gets great mileage out of letting the soul leave the body and roam about--as Ahab's does at night on the deck of the Pequod.

Literature and the compassion deficit

I've been thinking a lot lately about the need to show compassion, or "mercy" as Steve Almond puts it,* to the fictional characters one creates. I've been trying to do more of that, after receiving critiques from readers that they could not relate to some of my characters. As students from my class, "Imitation of Life," know, this whole issue is an obsession of mine. The class itself grew out of the frequent comment one hears in fiction workshops, to wit, "I didn't like this character." Meaning the story needs fixing.

But it's not just writing students who say such things. Michiko Kakutani recently eviscerated Jonathan Lethem's new novel, Chronic City. Among her objections was that the main character "expects his friends to stay up all night listening to his stream-of-consciousness rants." Kakutani does not want Perkus Tooth as a friend! What a burden he would be! Whereas Gregory Cowles's review in the weekend NYT Book Review takes these "dorm-room" style rants as satire, which, I suspect, is how they were intended. This is not to say Kakutani is wrong to dislike the book. I'm I am saying that tastes differ, and expectations about what readers can and should seek from literature differ. So Lethem did not awaken mercy in Kakutani. Cowles either did not expect that awakening, or he found it in recognizing Tooth's foolishness. He did not disengage because Tooth was annoying.

Still, in consciously trying to be merciful to characters I'm satirizing in my own work, I am finding that the work becomes more complex and subtle. So this has been a good experiment thus far, and I'm learning lots. In fact, I expect this is ultimately the way to go. So why am I still resistant to the relatively simple, and it would seem moral, guideline of showing mercy? Because I still don't believe characters are equivalent to people. And if readers are seeking to find mercy in themselves, or in the world, as they are reading, what does that say about the real world? In other words, are readers turning to literature to experience the compassion that they do not experience in life? Why can we not turn to each other for compassion, and seek different experiences in literature?

But it's not for me to judge people for what they seek when they read. And perhaps what many really want from literature is something more complicated than "liking" characters or having good feelings about them. Perhaps they seek emotional challenge--to have mercy awakened for characters who are not so easy to like, and to see how that feels. It may be too risky to feel compassion for chronic complainers, freeloaders, abusers, and worse in real life. Then those people attach themselves to us, wear us down, and do considerable damage which we are well advised to avoid. So we seek guidance or practice in dealing with such people in literature, a way to go through the complex emotions and reassure ourselves that we can be merciful--even if we aren't as merciful as we'd like to be in our everyday lives.

Also this concept works better if we think of "character" in very broad outlines. It's not just representations of recognizably human beings, fitted with bodies and stamped with first names and surnames. Character could include tone and voice, so even if one's work is more abstract, it could still awaken mercy for conditions or experiences.


*H/t Kim Wyatt. Actually Almond is saying writers should awaken mercy in their readers, which implies the author is feeling it when she is writing. Here's one place Almond made the statement, a 2003 interview with Bookslut. The rest of the interview is well worth reading.