Death to the omniscient narrator!

In my novel, here is how Al, one of the main characters and narrator, describes himself:

I’m the storyteller. I will tell you that I’m not some omnipresent narrator
pretending to know the nuances and motivations of every single character in
every single instance of this story. I try to read minds, I infer, I theorize
for the sake of the story, I story tell, but alas, I am only human. I think it
would be philosophically irresponsible in today’s world, in this story in
particular, if I didn’t bring that up at the get go.

I am reading another story right now with the standard third-person omniscient narrator. I understand the literary and functional reasons for using such a narrator. It is easier to read from this point of view, and I assume it is probably easier to write this way as well. It is difficult to detail people's thoughts and motivations from any other perspective, because when you try, another person is involved and it muddles up the whole process. But that is the point! That is life!

There is a certain vanity to writing. In the act of creation, you are in total control of the world you are making. It's your world. You give existence to characters, you control entire worlds and what happens there within is completely up to you. I had to ask myself: Do I have a god complex? Do I fight this fight to give myself meaning? To make me, the writer, matter? Maybe. It's my world, my characters, and they do take on a life all their own. Al certainly is alive to me, I speak with him all of the time, in my head. He is one of the perspectives I have of the world, and anytime I view things from his slant, I feel he is the one talking through me. (No, I am not schizophrenic. Figuratively, not literally.)

As the story unfolds in your head in fits and jumps, you must then extract it from there effectively to display it to the real world. Along that journey, it's difficult to relent control of your world. It will always be your world, but once it's out there for everyone else, it changes. Such is the nature of art; it is a deeply personal experience for the artist, but as well for the audience, and you the artist cannot control everything about their experience.

With an omnipresent narrator, you are attempting to control that experience as much as possible. By listing every emotion, every motivation, you attempt to take away any other possibilities in order to keep control of your world. You are not only controlling the world you created, but how that world is interpreted by the masses. I feel that is not only an impossible goal, but an irresponsible goal as well.

There is no situation in life that lends itself to an omniscient narrator. You never know what is going on inside the person next to you, no matter how well you know them, you still don't know. You have to guess, you have to use your mind and work towards the various possibilities. But everyone sees things from their perspective, you cannot control that no matter how hard you try. And that is okay. Sure it can be messy without the all knowing, all seeing narrator guiding you, just as life can be messy without the all knowing, all seeing god to guide you. But that is okay as well. One thing many have forgotten since childhood, messy is fun!

If someone takes my story the wrong way, so it goes as Vonnegut would say. There will be interpretations that are inconceivable to me, possibilities I cannot imagine. I'm excited by that. Such is life. This unknown is not something to fear, but to enjoy.

It all comes down to this

My son did an art project at his Christian preschool last week. Here is a picture of it hanging on the fridge:

“I am special.” Its simplicity struck me.

That is the root of religion/theism. That is the hook that pulls you in, and holds you in. That is the choice, either you are special, or you are not. And boy, they hit you with it from the very beginning! (Not that I would tell a 4 year old anything different. As I have said before, I let my kids believe in fairy tales of all kinds: the Easter Bunny of course, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, God, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. Its part of childhood and I don’t want to deny them their childhood.)

But it will always come back to this one question: Am I special?

Its the same question as: Am I an individual? Am I unique? Do I matter?

Sure religion is a divisive force in the world, and sure the Bible is a crock of shit, and Intelligent Design is anything but intelligent. But religion is the only game in town that believes I’m special, and I want to believe I’m special. So despite all of the messiness associated with theism, and in spite of the rational world that contradicts any deity, I choose to believe, because I want to be special.

The New Atheists can attack religion all they want, but very intelligent people cannot get past this one last hurdle, the belief in self. There has to be a me, a me that makes choices in this life, a me that matters. Meaninglessness is not an option.

For most anyways. We here at the Church of Irrelevance embrace meaninglessness. Free of the constraints of self is how we prefer to live.

Irrelevance song of the day

Happy Birthday Karl Wallinger! I heard on 94.9's This Date in Music History segment that today is his birthday, so I tuned my phone to World Party's Goodbye Jumbo on my commute to work today. Just an unbelievable album that never gets old. Anyway, track 8, God on my Side, inspired this post, as it is fantastic example of irrelevane in action in the world:

Well I seen you out there parading
In the streets of your distant land
In your strange caps and clothing
Shouting, "I don't understand."
But you, you look so loaded
It's somethin' I can't feel
But I'm into some God action
And maybe yours is real
'Cos I'm falling
I need your God on my side
I need your God on my side

Well I see you objecting so strongly
To the ways of the liberal disease
And your armchair satisfaction
As you narrow the meaning of free
And I dream of a home that is tidy
And a church full of money bees
And I wonder about the suppression
That you get when you're down on your knees
And I'm falling
I need your God on my side
I need your God on my side

God on my side ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh
God on my side ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh
God on my side ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh
God on my side ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh

Well I see you thought we could change the world
If we gather round and pray
But it's just like sending one letter
to more than just one place
But, "Dear God can you help us"
Must be the opening phrase
Cos we're falling
Need your God on my side
One I can call my own
I need my God on your side
Make a happy home
We need their God on our side
In search of him I will roam
Need our God on our side
Mine got up and left home
You need our God on your side
Ooh ooh ooh

Just noticed the release date on Amazon, April 1990. 1990! Man oh man, what a long time ago. Yet the song is just as appropriate as ever, showing how little change has taken place these last 19 years. Sad.

Irrelevance song of the day

Hell, for me, this is the song of the last year! It is from MGMT, off of Oracular Spectacular. The song is called Time to Pretend. I listen to it two or three mornings each week on my commute to my office job.

I'm feeling rough, I'm feeling raw, I'm in the prime of my life.
Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives.
I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars.
You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars.

This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We've got the vision, now let's have some fun.
Yeah, it's overwhelming, but what else can we do.
Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute.

Forget about our mothers and our friends
We're fated to pretend
To pretend
We're fated to pretend
To pretend

I'll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms
I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world
I'll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home
Yeah, I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.

There's really nothing, nothing we can do
Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew.
The models will have children, we'll get a divorce
We'll find some more models, everything must run it's course.

We'll choke on our vomit and that will be the end
We were fated to pretend
To pretend
We're fated to pretend
To pretend

Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah

The lead song off your first album, I'd say MGMT gets irrelevance! Just a brilliant, kick ass song!

The Question of God

"Do you believe in God?"

I think the question of God is a very funny question, but to most it is such a serious subject they don't seem to understand it in my context. You have to re-phrase the question back to them:

"Do I believe in an omnipotent, omniscient entity that created the world five thousand years ago, that created people in his image, that demands the worship of and closely watches over all seven billion people, all the while adding to his naughty and nice list to determine who will gain entry into his eternal club upon their death? That God?"

"Too literal? Then do I believe everything we see/touch/feel/hear/taste was purposely created by one all powerful entity who should be revered for giving us the gift of life? That God?"

Either way, I would have to say no. An emphatic no.

It also works for meaninglessness.

"How could you believe your life has no meaning?"

"How could you believe, as one speck of a person among billions on this speck of dust circling one of billions of stars in this galaxy, which is one of billions of galaxies in the known universe, that your life does have meaning?"

Press release by Fuego

We are just starting to market the book, the press release can be found here.

• HTML Version: http://www.prlog.org/10357315-fuego-publications-launches-its-burnworthy-series.html
• PDF Version: http://www.prlog.org/10357315-fuego-publications-launches-its-burnworthy-series.pdf

As with everything, any and all feedback is welcome.

Stories like this scare me

I found this link at The Reason Project: The Nightmare of Christianity

I am very afraid this will become an all too familiar story: person brought up in a ultra rigid religious way, and hence completely without touch to the rest of the world, finds out about the rest of the world and cannot reconcile the two, leading to personal confusion, distrust, hatred and violence. This may be the new frontier of the spiritual war. That part is not too surprising honestly.

But there was one line in the article that stood out :

"Murray had been indoctrinated so thoroughly into charismatic Pentecostal
culture, however, that even while he railed against his religious upbringing, he
could not abandon his ingrained attraction to religiosity."

An attraction to religiousity. Seems to hit home pretty hard. Isn't the creation of alternative (read fake) churches a continued attraction to religiousity? Even irrelevance itself, is that nothing more than continued religiousity?

As I read the New Athiest books, one thing that always struck me as over the top was the railing against teaching religion to kids. Indoctrination. Please. I let my kids believe in Santa, in the Easter Bunny, and in God and heaven. They are the comforts of childhood, harmless. I rationalized that I was indoctrinated, and I felt it had no effect on me as it means next to nothing to me now. But do I have a continued attraction to religiousity? Heck, the novel is about nothing but the attaction to religiousity!

What does it mean? I'm not sure, but it sure keeps me thinking! And that is the most important part of all.

Irrelevance link of the day

I was reading the always fun TMQ, and he included a link with the following write up:

The map contains about 100,000 dots. The dots are not stars; each dot represents
a galaxy, and galaxies are thought to average about 100 billion stars each. Thus
the area depicted contains holds roughly 10 to the 15th power stars, a number
far too huge to bother attempting to fathom. And the map merely shows galaxies
nearby. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is at the center of the map. On the cosmic
scale, a place with 100 billion stars is a dot.

In that context, view the photo, and revel in irrelevance!

Irrelevance link of the day

A basic building block for life is found in space.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for someone to come out and refute these findings. People 'round here don't take kindly to these kinds of ideas. You know, the ones were we are just another spec of cosmic space dust, not the center of the universe. I'll put the over/under at a week; I partially expect a immediated, but unsubstatiated, personal attack on the researchers, but I can also see a real attempt at disproving the findings that may take a while longer. At a week, you can see the former feels more likely to me than the latter!

The Spiritual War and Irrelevance

The Spiritual War

“We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.” -Fight Club (movie), screenplay by Jim Uhls, directed by David Fincher, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk.

The landscape of American spirituality is undergoing a dramatic shift. Based on the American Religious Identification Survey of 2008(1), the largest religious affiliation shift has been to no organized religion, which has more than doubled in size from an estimated 14 million adults in 1990 to 34 million in 2008. This shift has enabled a litany of New York Times best sellers from the New Atheists (this list is not meant to be all inclusive):

• The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris (2005)
• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (2006)
• Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris (2006)
• Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (2006)
• God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens (2007)

The rhetoric is highly similar: religion is a by product of human evolution; we have evolved to a point that we no longer need religion; reason should replace religion; religion is inherently dangerous to boot. These writers, and their growing legion of followers, have been labeled as the aggressive atheists. This is hardly surprising; what minority, when speaking out against the majority, was not viewed as aggressive?

The moral majority view point is responding to this growing atheist voice with best sellers of their own:

• unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity, by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons (2007);
• The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, by Timothy Keller (2008)
• Why Faith Matters, by David J. Wolpe (2008)

Once again, the rhetoric is highly similar: religion is necessary for Morality™ (Morality is a trademark of Organized Religion, all rights reserved); God is truth; the Bible is the word of God so it must be true; evolution nor science nor any other man made ideas that contradict the Bible can possible be true. This deep-rooted, but eroding majority has become increasingly defensive over the last decade, even developing the intelligent design ‘theory’ in an effort to discount evolution and return theology to the realm of science.

Yet even as legions are leaving organized religion, and in spite of the high level of publicity generated around atheism, the sentiment towards this group remains decidedly negative, further agitating a growing minority. In 2007, USA Today/Gallup conducted a poll(2) to gauge the tolerance of voters towards specific minorities. The findings were startling. Pollsters were asked “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be (blank), would you vote for that person?” The table below summarizes the yes votes by qualification:

Black 94%
Female 88%
Hispanic 87%
Mormon 72%
Homosexual 55%
Atheist 45%

In many cases, the poll results showed the growing tolerance of America. In comparing the recent poll to responses from the 1987 poll, 15% more were accepting of a black candidate and 6% more for a woman. Since 1983, 26% more polled were accepting of a homosexual. These results represent a positive snapshot of the progress of American minorities. Accept in one case: atheism. In 1987, 44% would vote for an atheist, over twenty years later that had improved by just 1%.

The moral majority remains fervent in their worldview and distrustful of the non-religious. The growing minority, buoyed with solace that they are not alone, continues to feel the strain of being the minority. The gulf between the two remains wide, with no empathy in either side as each side sees it as a black and white issue: there is right, there is wrong, and the TRUTH tells you which is which. The TRUTH is infallible, and anyone not believing in their version of the TRUTH is horribly wrong. One side gets its TRUTH from deductive reasoning, the other gets its TRUTH from an 1,800 year old collection of fables and a ton of faith. No solution, it is war.

Irrelevance not war

Irrelevance believes in no TRUTH, and instead laughs while watching both sides butting their heads into proverbial walls. The posturing of the moral majority is unintentional comedy of the highest quality, for example: evolution is false because of "reliable eyewitness testimony", meaning the Bible! You can’t make this stuff up, I giggle every time I read “reliable eyewitness testimony”.

The new atheists are also very entertaining as they endlessly spar with religion with a conviction that you can actually spar with religion, when in reality it would be easier to logically disprove Santa to a devote 6 year old. (I understand the reason, I appreciate the effort, but come on, do you really think you are changing people’s minds? Paradigm shifts pass as generations pass; the Copernican sun-centric view only took firm hold after the last of the earth-centric holdouts passed to their graves.)

Irrelevance is content to sit back and watch the show, diligently following the latest advances science has to offer, offering its help to spiritual war survivors, yet quietly understanding the meaninglessness of the self.



Sources:

1. "American Religious Identification Survey (2008)," by Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, at http://americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf
2. “Some Americans Reluctant to Vote for Mormon, 72-Year-Old Presidential Candidates,” by Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup News Service, at http://www.gallup.com/poll/26611/Some-Americans-Reluctant-Vote-Mormon-72YearOld-Presidential-Candidates.aspx

No better time to start

Swept into last place by the stupid dbacks on Wednesday. No hit for six Thursday in a bad, bad blowout to the Gigantes. Then no hit for the full nine the last night to the same Gigantes. (At least I wasn't at this one, and thankfully turned went to sleep early last night.) Now losers of six in a row. Ouch. There is no way around it, this is rock bottom. Padre baseball can get no worse than this moment, so now is the time to start my blog!

But this is not the typical baseball blog where fans complain about the roster, the size of the payroll, the pathetic lineup or even worse pitching staff. If you want to sound off on this type of stuff, go to a different blog or go complain on DePodesta's. I don't care about any of that stuff, I have no control over that. I don't think I could do a better job than the front office, nor the coaching staff. I don't think any of that stuff matters at all. I just cheer for the Pads.

Baseball is about failure and that failure inspired the novel The Church of Irrelevance, so I am thankful always. Besides, some of my favorite baseball memories take place during absolutely dreadful Padre seasons. Some take place during absolutely great Padre seasons as well, ut there seems to be less of those, such is life. Roll with it, in the end, it is just a game. In the end, we are all irrelevant anyways.

Another game tonight, Tim Stauffer returns to the majors. Not that I expect anyone to get excited about that, but hey, it can't get any worse than last night.