The best of times the worst of times

[Raphael Saltwood]

Well, yeah, there’s that.

But as my dad used to say, though I’m sure he didn’t make it up, “look at the donut, not the hole.”

If you read Pynchon for sentens then sure. But I’ve tended to read him more for solas. I mean, yes, he does connect a lot of the dots to make it easier to understand how things are so messed up. But there’s those beautiful sentences (solas-giving sentences), there’s the cheerfulness of his Fools on the brinks of all the cliffs he depicts, there’s the limning of moods ne’er so well-expressed, the moments of grace, the camaraderie. The humor.

But yeah. It’s like the Bible, in Sunday School and a million or more pulpits when they hit those Old Testament tales, and give us the example of David or Solomon to emulate. I mean they take one tiny little good thing they might have done and completely ignore the thousands of wives and concubines which must’ve cramped the style of lots of young Israelite dudes looking for love, the territorial expansionism which made them bad neighbors, the militarism which wasted so much human potential, so as to focus on a few Psalms the content of many of which is dubious or outright reprehensible…or make much of an expression of repentance and a belief in and acceptance of forgiveness, without any attempt that I can think of to make amends or change one’s ways

…looking at the donut with a vengeance…

And why?
Accentuate the positive?
IQ test - given the facts, see how many people see the implicit lessons (“that was what he did, but really, don’t you be like David, except in these carefully curated regards…”)?

Robert Anton Wilson sez regarding division of labor in the individual mind: what the thinker thinks, the finder finds.
Looking for the silver lining?
Is the main thing about my life that I live in late capitalism and a bunch of clueless greed heads are running around doing weird shit that if they applied a smidgen of ethics, not to mention commonsense, they could improve things for everyone?

Nah - hellz no! - that’s just part of the backdrop.

Checks and balances are inevitable & if I look for the good maybe I can find a way to make a positive contribution that isn’t completely clueless. Meantime there’s all this other interesting stuff going on, much of which has nothing to do with that at all; or even if affected by the clueless greed heads there’s still parts that are a bit of all right.

But yeah. Got to do one’s due diligence, move away from being part of the problem. Somehow.

Anyway, in re stories -
Me, I like a verbose explicit moral - but perhaps a panorama of (often, but not exclusively) ill effects and a clear (or at least findable) attribution of causes to human behaviors (and a panoply of natural laws that is still being plumbed, if you can plumb a panoply - like, I want a big shower head in my panoply and a Clivus Multrum a-and grey water for the garden…) serves the same purpose in fiction.

In place of a simplistic lesson producing an edict that wouldn’t anyhow be obeyed (a storyteller doesn’t have recourse to compulsion the way the acknowledged legislators of the world have) - we’re given sadness to sympathize with, and something to like about even the bad guys.

But yeah. Your point still resonates. It’s why those movies about the founding of Facebook or that portray Gates and Jobs don’t have much traction for me. They leave so much out.

BE does some much better tinkering with that mythos, imho.


Joseph Tracy wrote:


Just wanted to mention that this was my most malign and satirically dark way of seeing the chums. To me the chums are about the role fiction plays in how we interpret history and culture. We have some beautiful fictions but it often seems our favorite story, no matter what cultural niche we occupy, is how we, the good guys, at great risk have challenged the dark forces and won a small or great  battle for all that we( whoever we are) hold dear. ( See the Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit.) Now the narratives have armies of computers,  mobile phones,  memers, twitterers and twits, mostly generating  distractions from the obvious cracks in a civilization undermined by its own greed.


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