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This Appendix presents an evolving collection of informal explanatory notes, expanded commentaries, personal reflections, and some selected artifacts from my thought process of planning and developing The Way of Prometheus. This Appendix should both help to clarify some aspects of the project and offer you an interesting look behind the scenes. I cannot quite take words like exegesis seriously and in no way do I propose to offer an objective or authoritative reading of my intentionally ambiguous work, but I offer you some explication here in hopes that my creative process and intent will be interesting to others too. Notes are organized according to rough topics. Go here if you have a question you want me to answer on this page. My pledge: I will include no spoilers in these notes that will ruin the experience, provided you have already read published parts of the story. So read them before notes on this page. — Phoenix
Topics:
Notes on Prolog(Analog) and Epilog(Analog)
Title Explanations: Prolog = Programmable logic (an AI language) or a prolog(ue) Epilog = a variant upon the language Prolog or an epilog(ue) Analog = "1. Something that bears an analogy to something else, or 2. Biology. An organ or structure that is similar in function to one in another kind of organism but is of dissimilar evolutionary origin." [dictionary.com] Also, something continuously variable or ambiguous as opposed to something digital from defined values, for instance one and zero in computer data. Prolog(Analog) = Prolog, symbolizing logic and/or artificial intelligence, as a function of an analog set, life – continuously variable and ambiguous, rather than defined. Also a prolog to the story of an analog of human life, ADITI Epilog(Analog) = Epilog, symbolizing logic and/or artificial intelligence, as a function of an analog set, life – freeflowing and ambiguous, rather than defined. Also an epilog to the story of an analog of human life, ADITI
Prolog Intentions: The article in Prolog(Analog) is intended to awaken, to provoke, to sting like a gadfly (cf. Socrates), to rend asunder unconsidered frameworks and expose the reader to wider contexts and wider possibilities, so that the real work can begin in the body of TWoP. How would we look to someone in the future, if we were laid bare?
Notes on Flesh, Fire and Cloth
This part was formerly titled "Conducting War" at an earlier stage of development. The new title is much more appropriate, I felt. For one thing it is much grittier.
Notes on Boy Hero
Of course in fact I wrote the poem Boy Hero, but I wrote earlier versions of the poem separately (originally before starting TWoP) and not just for its use here. I write little poetry compared with prose. Most of the poetry I write is personal and of private significance, and usually short. The length of this poem is unusual, as is my adaptation of it for this publically-displayed purpose. As a matter of trivia, years ago when I started the poem, I had intended it to become much longer, more of a length suggestive of epic verse. The reader astute about poetry might guess where additional stanzas might go. I never got that far with it before I no longer felt like the same person who had been motivated to write it. Nor had I satisfied my own usual perfectionism, but then I felt that leaving it in a more amateur form preserved a certain unhewn charm, rough in places like an half-polished stone, and I decided I could adapt it to play a role as an artifact in TWoP, unfinished. I like it better this way. Just for the record I do not agree with ADITI about poetry. Being only human as far as linguistic abilities I am impressed by competent wordplay. I do however agree about rhyme, for the most part. The Philip in the poem is Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander 'the Great'. Alexander was a tyrant and conqueror among other things, who is at present still a common hero archetype of ours thanks as much to his own press as any heroic qualities he actually had. Why doesn't ADITI come up with this guess? Note that Alexander as a modern hero-archetype is an obvious guess for a famous son of a Philip, today. But in her future, the hero-archetypes have changed. She would not necessarily associate the heroic context with Alexander, especially given the indirect reference just to a Philip. There is also a thread of discussion about a preliminary version of the poem here, in the forum at Prometheanmovement.org.
Notes on Daphnomancy and Dragonslaying
The original note detailing the intention for this part was:
More on daphnomancy from here: “Laurel has been known since ancient times. In Greece and Rome it was a symbol of peace and victory in military and sporting activities. That is why Laurel is also called Lauro Nobili. In Ancient Greece, Laurel was consecrated to Apollo, God of Music and Poetry, as well as the Oracle of Delfi and is the reason for which the first of the six temples were decorated with Laurel frescos. It is sald that the Priestess of the Oracle fell into a trance after inhaling the smoke of the burning Laurel leaves. A large amount of the plant can cause hypnotic trances. Laurel was a sacred plant of Ascepio, sun of Apollo, God of Medicine. For centuries, the plant has been used against many diseases, especially the plague. Even today Laurel is hung in houses to refresh the air, and also used to protect flour and dried figs against harmful insects.” Also see:
On the subject of dragons: Some notes adding perspective on the dragon,
killing
and death metaphors:
Understand that Nietzsche does not speak (with regards to most cases) literally here. Think of a forest: the looming old trees must fall in order for new plants to have light and a place in the sun to thrive; to only live in the shadow of the past means inhibition of flourishing if not suppression of existence. Life cannot simply "share nicely" unless it has the benefit of superfluity — another important theme when discussing life, but unfortunately not one always as relevant to personal and social life as scarcity, which ensures competition as a natural aspect of life. For example, fundamental social models and principles are often mutually exclusive, as are deeply held inner beliefs. In a Promethean role one destroys to re-create: oneself, new ideals and values, a new future. One does not necessarily respect the old or the static things simply because "they are." Mere acceptance of factors leads to decay within oneself, because one then cannot "shed one's skin" like a snake (or dragon) in order to change, and one remains imprisoned in a skin that constrains oneself. Acceptance also leads to living without critical evaluation of even the most fetid, rotting legacies of old principles, ideas, traditions, practices, mental models, imprisoned by them as well. Further musing on these metaphors: I enjoy employing very similar metaphors at times for quite contradictory imports so as to avoid static associations and moral inculcation. Compare the use of riding dragons, here and in Power and the Corrupted. Possibly, my inclination toward certain symbols again and again has something to do with which vocabulary-metaphors are most useful in general for the same purpose of teaching fluidity, i.e. those which get used with more than one representation.
Notes on The Solstice That Forgets The Sun
An Amazing "Coincidence": The central materials featured were originally written on the winter Solstice, Dec 21st 2003, unconsciously! About the precise hour too. I had spent a dark day, literally and figuratively – feeling poorly, depressed, I was disposed to think about the problem of nihilism and ponder how to involve it – had been thinking of Ragnarok lately, and Nietzsche's eternal recurrence and discussions of nihilism in TGS & WTP. At similar latitude and darkness (5.5 hours of oblique, scattered illumination), I tapped into the same existential dilemma the ancient Norsemen might have experienced with the Solstice, the sort of experience which contributes to the formation of the legends I was connecting to, at the same time of the year, although I didn't realize consciously it was the darkest night when I thought and wrote.
The Significance of Hunger: A further exercise in unfolding implicate meaning: compare “the wolf that devours,” “the monster gapes”, “the dragon who chews” and “hungry phantasm” with the cross-cultural concepts of “hungry ghosts.” (Some are given here.) Japanese Buddhism has examples such as the gaki and jikininki, Romans had lemures, Slavic and Baltic lands had various vampires. (Note that hungry ghosts are often depicted as eating corpses, and Nidhogg means “tearer of corpses.”) The common theme is unquenchable desire preying parasitically or as scavenger, contra natural life. This can be viewed as an externalized manifestation with reference to an internal aspect, which it certainly does symbolize in Buddhism. Then, what has this to do with nihilism? Existential crisis and aloneness might seem unrelated to appetite. And yet we are speaking of images of unseemly, unquenchable, and unfulfilled appetite. Resulting hopeless disappointment and disaffection lays the path to feelings of existential isolation and life having no value; they give us sense that whatever we have, or whatever we might gain, will not satisfy us. The slavering phantoms and monsters are like the harbingers of Void within our ancestral consciousness, embedded cultural warnings of apathetic, empty psychological crisis and doom. These allegories reek of death only because that is the closest mythic analogy to lifeless life. Like his ancestors Surt imagines that Nothingness must be hungry for us; our deep association with nothingness is that it is hungry for something to feed it. (We even have notions of the astronomical phenomena of black holes craving matter to digest.) Why? Because we are hungry — “spiritually,” for meaning and significance and a foundation of values to sanctify our lives — and we project this upon the externalization of our self-destructive tendency toward nihilism. The hungry manifestations then represent the way we try to feed our need for the nourishment of deep meaning with superficial replacement needs, in many individual variations, from material greed, to sexual lust, to transitory entertainment, to asceticism, to industriousness, to literal gluttony. Even, any ill-fitting religiosity that does not satisfy an individual’s need for inner meaning although it supposedly should. It is we humans who are perpetually hungry for something that really matters, thus, the monster of hungry Darkness “is always us”. The impotence of Void lies within us, just as the potential of Life remains implicate within us.
Fiery Rebirth: Even the beast of darkness Skoll in threatening to swallow up the heavenly source of light and life ultimately provides the goad for the birth of a new star, again giving warmth and light to guide mankind. Excerpt of Skoll entry from The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology by Arthur Cotterell and Rachel Storm (2003), p. 228:
The same book notes the commonality of the metaphor as the same entry continues:
With typically Nordic ferocity, the myth of Surt echoes the rejuvenation-through-trial theme evident in such signature fire symbology as the swallowing of the sun, and the phoenix’s consumption, and the Promethean myth itself, but particularly parallels the phoenix transformation. Excerpt from Surt entry p. 228-229:
Surt embodies creation possible through destruction, despite the superficial “evilness” suggested by his opposition to the established orders, his dark name (which might alternately suggest cinders), and the violence of the imagery (which is really not very different from the violence in Nordic mythology in general). That some kinds of life-giving heroism, despite fitting intrinsically within the cycle of life like the fallowing to the planting, might be viewed in traditional terms as “evil” is a deeply Nietzschean concept, and one modern “Satanists” have embraced in the guise of maximal effrontery to monotheistic moral expectations.
Notes on linguistics
ADITI communicates with Aka Miembe using the occasional Kiswahili (Swahili language) word or phrase. Here are some relevant meanings for these Kiswahili words:
Notes on ADITI, the name
ADITI stands for:
There was (is?) a project associated with the artificial intelligence language Prolog called Aditi, although the origin of the name in this case is (amazingly) coincidental, having to do instead with the above acronym and the mythological deity Aditi. From pantheon.org:
Historical note: ADITI's working place-holder name initially was IGNIA, a name with fairly obvious etymological reference, my first use of which was to name a fiery planet for a science fiction computer game I never got the chance to make called Heroes of Terra. (The fledgling precursor to The Promethean Manifesto rapidly became more interesting than pitching the half-done, though very intriguing functional concept I had in mind, especially when my newly (anti-)political philosophy outdistanced the essentially libertarian underpinnings of the mythos for my intended storytelling.) Other things from that game anticipate TWoP or can be found in it, actually, and so it wasn't a complete waste of time. In any case, the name Ignia may come in as a planet later also.
Notes on form/formlessness of TWoP
A Symbolic Structure: Why this formless form? The advocates of a systematized philosophy are so often friends of a systematized world as well, with everything in its place - everything kept in place, actually. A philosophy can describe the world with useful accuracy and have integrated parts and aspects (as the first two parts of The Promethean Trilogy do). But a monolithic system and a pretense at universal organization is inevitably false order, a mere description which distorts complex realities, and causes trouble when such distortions are applied as if they described things well. Such complaints have been raised about many of the most influential thinkers, e.g. Plato, Hegel, Kant, Marx, as well as less notorious figures. So often such thinkers' objective 'truths' or 'rules' or 'imperatives' weigh heavy in practice. And so stagnant and repressive is their 'harmony' or 'perfection' conceived in the detailed management of relations between individual and rule, or between castes or classes, or between masters and slaves. How appropriate, then, to conclude The Promethean Trilogy with Way's integrated and interdependent, yet unsystematized fragments. This new twist on the ancient tradition of the teaching story allows the reader to extrapolate his or her own meaning like an archaeologist trying to make sense of bits of evidence, and hints at the complexity of the world it describes. I tried to create a new form for the first two parts of the Promethean Trilogy but for the third… I wanted something different. I wanted to make a statement with the 'form' of the third, that the circle of three is not to be closed neatly. To some extent this statement is made by asserting that the first two parts are to remain in progress, always republished in new, improved/updated editions. But Way makes a broader statement by its incorporation of many more forms, and it bursts open out of a closed circuit in another more vivid way. There is no neat cycle, here, brought to a close by more of the same. There is just a Lot to say. The third part suggests and evokes more than it can ever express directly, and as such expresses Possibility far more neatly than the more formulaic first two parts. What life can be, will be, who knows, maybe must be, doesn't fit into a premeditated order any more than The Promethean Trilogy does, despite following a very traditional order of threes. The final message had to be one of boundlessness even within bounds, no limits even within limits — ADITI.
Not Quite So Profound: The form of TWoP is certainly many other things as well, but I laughed when I realized that a truncated description of the form might be: "a futuristic 1001 Nights told in the email of an artificial being." My own weird way of writing what I know, I suppose.
Notes on The Way of Prometheus, the name
"Way" can be read in The Way of Prometheus to mean, among its other meangs, any or all of these at various times (from American Heritage):
Besides these definitions and the layers of symbolism and connotation involved with them, there is also an allusion to Lao Tzu.
More notes to come... |
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