Huxley tries to have his cake and eat it too

Two quotations from Aldous Huxley's ‘Spinoza’s Worm’ (1929):

'The means by which men try to turn themselves into supermen are murderous’

‘Simple lifers, like Tolstoy and Gandhi, ignore the most obvious facts. Chief amongst these is the fact that machinery, by increasing production, has permitted an increase in population. There are twice as many human beings today [Huxley is writing in the 1920s] as there were a hundred years ago. If we scrap the machinery, we kill at least half the population. When Gandhi advocates the return to handicrafts, he is advocating the condemnation to death of about nine hundred million human beings. Tamburlaine’s butcheries are insignificant compared to the cosmic massacre so earnestly advocated by our mild and graminivorous Mahatma.’

Steampunk

SF, counterintuitively enough, is often a mode of nostalgia for the future. Steampunk, by articulating a nostalgia for the past, might appear to be a more straightforward, or less paradoxical, business; but in fact Steampunk actualises a nostalgia for the past as the impossible future.

Expansive

Spacetime is expanding, and has been since the big bang.  We think of this as happening on the very largest scales, and so it is.  But it is happening on the very smallest scales too—spacetime is the ground of existence on all scales, after all.  Why, then, aren’t hydrogen atoms (say) getting bigger?  Why isn’t the ‘space’ between nucleus and electrons growing at a rate of tens of metres per second?  There are several possible answers to this question, and here’s one: the subatomic particles, out of which the material cosmos is constructed, are ‘actually’ the rents and fundamental flaws in spacetime magnified to the materiality by expansion itself.
Ooh, scare-quote overload.  Still: a good SFnal, if not a good Physics, idea.

Morton on Tolkien

Amongst many other arguments, Timothy Morton's hectic but stimulating Ecology without nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics (Harvard University Press 2007) situates Tolkien both in terms of the longer tradition of ‘Romantic nationalism’ and environmental art.

As the idea of world (Welt) became popular in German Romantic idealism, so the nation-state was imagined as a surrounding environment. The idea of the nation as “homeland” … demanded a poetic rendering as an ambient realm of swaying corn, shining seas, or stately forests. Nature appeared sublime “there” and yet fundamentally beyond representation, stretching beyond the horizon and back into the distant, even pre-human past. It was a suitable objective correlative for the je ne sais quoi of nationalist fantasy. Walter Scott’s invention of historical novels, realist fictions generating an entire world in a bubble of past-tense narrative, did as much for environmental nationalism as explicitly Romantic criticisms of modern society and technology. [97]

He goes on to read Tolkien in this light.

The Shire, in J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings depicts the world bubble as an organic village. Tolkien narrates the victory of the suburbanite, the “little person,” embedded in a tamed yet natural-seeming environment. Nestled into the horizon as they are in their burrows, the wider world of global politics is blissfully unavailable to them. Tolkien’s work embodies a key nationalist fantasy, a sense of “world” as real, tangible yet indeterminate, evoking a metonymic chain of images—an anamorphic form. The Lord of the Rings establishes not only entire languages, histories, and mythologies, but also a surrounding world. If ever there was evidence of the persistence of Romanticism, this is it. 

In Heidegger’s supremely environmental philosophy, the surrounding ambience created by Tolkien’s narratives is called Unwelt. This is the deep ontological sense in which things are “around”—they may come in handy, but whether they do or not, we have a care for them. It is a thoroughly environmental idea. Things are oriented in relation to other things: “the house has its sunny side and its shady side.” Others (elves, dwarves, men) care for their surroundings differently. The strangeness of Middle-earth, its permeation with others and their worlds, is summed up in the metaphor of the road, which becomes an emblem for narratives. The road comes right up to you front door. To step across it is to cross a threshold between inside and outside. There is a sense that the story, and the world it describes, could go “ever on and on” like the road in Bilbo Baggins’s song. But wherever we go in this world, however strange or threatening our journey, it will always be familiar, insofar as it has all been planned in advance, mapped out , accounted for. This planning is not quite as narrowly rational as a modern factory. Still, the recent film of The Lord of the Rings, with its built-in commentaries on the special edition DVD about the craftsmanship and industrial processes that went into making it, reveals something true about the book. The Umwelt is a function of holistic, total design, total creation: Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk with a how-to booklet thrown in. The holistic world that ‘”goes ever on and on” is exciting and involved, but in the end, it is just a gigantic version of the ready-made commodity. This is ironic, since one of the themes of the work is the resistance to industrialism and specifically to commodity fetishism, in the form of the hypnotic ring itself. [98]

This is interesting stuff, although Morton evidently feels rather condescendingly about the book itself: ‘what gets lost in this elaborate attempt to craft a piece of kitsch that could assuage the ravages of industrialism?’ he asks, answering ‘hesitation, irony, ambiguity’, glossing the middle term via Schlegel. I can see the ‘kitsch’ part, although it doesn’t strike me as a necessarily bad thing (on the contrary). But something is missing from this analysis; precisely the unexpected thing (the unexpected party) that Morton claims the novel erases. Since this is particularly true of the book’s engagement with ‘environmental aesthetics’, it’s a shame Morton doesn’t discuss it. Take: Tom Bombadil. It’s true he was smoothed over and erased by the more commodified film version of the tale; but he’s a crucial figure in the Fellowship (in some senses the crucial figure). He does not represent, but literally embodies, the irreducibility of ‘nature’ as something other than the ‘human’ world. Of course, he embodies this through a metaphysical logic of incarnation that as crucial to (Catholic) Tolkien’s world-view; and it’s possible that Morton has little sympathy with incarnation from an OOO-point of view—I don’t know, but I can imagine that the way the Christian concept prioritises ‘the human form’ over all over objects, to the point where the universe itself, or God, or (in LotR) Nature somehow metaphysically ‘is’ the human form … I can believe that such views are immiscible with OOO. Nonetheless one the things that is so wonderful about Tom Bombadil is precisely the way he doesn’t fit the well-tooled story model, the ‘road’ that the film-makers trod. It is precisely his gnarly peculiarity, his oddity, his naffness (blue coat, yellow boots! Endless fol-de-rol singing!). His non-identity. He represents precision a sort of narrative hesitation -- that's why Jackson and his screenwriters ditched him for their film version.

More Burnet

This is how Burnet thinks planets come about:

We sometimes see the Face of the Sun overgrown with thick Spots, and perceive him for some Days pale, obscure, and, as it were, in the Pangs of Death; but he that is Sick may Die; and what happens to one, may happen to others of the same King (now all the fixed Stars are homogenous ) therefore the fixed stars are perishable. Now a fixed Star perishes, and is extinguished, when being crusted over with a thick Shell or Scurf which it cannot break through, it degenerates into an obscure and opake Body, such as is a Planet. [Thomas Burnet, Archaeologiae Philosophicae sive Doctrina Antiqua de Rerum Originibus (1692)]

It's rather nice, but, coming in the middle of a critique of the imaginative logic of Genesis, it suffers from the same problem as that book: a lack of the actual scale, in terms of space and time, of the cosmos. There's something ineluctably human-scale about it.

Marinerime

I'm sure there's an academic paper on this, somewhere; though I don't know it. The epigraph to Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner':

Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit ? et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera ? Quid agunt ? quae loca habitant ? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in tabulâ, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari : ne mens assuefacta hodiernae vitae minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus.

This is from Thomas Burnet's Archaeologiae Philosophicae sive Doctrina Antiqua de Rerum Originibus (1692); and it speaks directly to the imaginative logic of the poem. This is what it means in English:

I can easily believe, that there are more invisible than visible Beings in the universe. But who shall describe for us their families? and their ranks and relationships and distinguishing features and functions? What they do? where they live? The human mind has always circled around a knowledge of these things, never attaining it. I do not doubt, however, that it is sometimes beneficial to contemplate, in thought, as in a Picture, the image of a greater and better world; lest the intellect, habituated to the trivia of daily life, may contract itself too much, and wholly sink into trifles. But at the same time we must be vigilant for truth, and maintain proportion, that we may distinguish certain from uncertain, day from night.

But maybe we should consider the larger design of the Archaeologiae Philosophicae and its relationship to Coleridge's poem: for this was a volume so unacceptable to contemporary theologians that Burnet was compelled to resign his post as chaplain in ordinary and Clerk of the Closet at Court. It is a detailed interrogation of the first chapters of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve that ponders, inter alia, whether the Fall of Man was a symbolic rather than literal event. And is not the 'Rime' a drama of a man's fall, rendered pagan and strange by its nautical resituation?

John 10

Not trying to nit-pick; but trying to read the tenth chapter:

1 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.
2 But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.
3 To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.
4 And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice.
5 And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers.
6 This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understood not what things they were which he spake unto them.
7 Then said Jesus unto them again, Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep.
8 All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them.
9 I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.
10 The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.
11 I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.

Not previously having given this much thought, I'd assumed that the point of the opening verses here is to say: only by entering licitly and in good gaith into the proper ways of the Christian church can you be saved (like the wicked man in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress who leaps over the wall at the beginning rather than going through the straight gate, undergoes all the trials of the progress himself and gets to the city of Zion, only to be carried off to hell at the last minute). But the emphasis, here, is not on the ordinary Christian: it is on Christ himself, or at a pinch, on his pastors: bishops and priests and whatnot. The regular Christian need not worry about this gate; the parable only concerns those who would seek to lead regular Christians (although, according to the logic of the tale, the wicked man would have no luck breaking into the sheep fold; the sheep would never follow 'a stranger' -- which makes the trope of the fence and gate and so on rather redundant). But the confusion is in verse 9, when Christ, having symbolised himself as a shepherd coming through the gate, goes on to symbolise himself as the gate as well. Christ enters the world as the good shepherd, but does so through Christ: a kind of sacramental existential short-circuit.

I think we've been getting this the wrong way about. The door is not 'from' the wider world 'into' the safety of the sheep-fold; for our world, though large, is finite and God infinite. The door is 'from' the smaller place to the larger (larger, indeed, is something of a misnomer): it leads out, not in.