When Magritte painted a picture of a pipe with the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”) underneath it, he was trying to get the viewer to be clear, philosophically, about what a picture is. It is a picture, not a pipe. It’s not such a great painting, as paintings go, and the message isn’t that profound, you’d think. Which is why it’s sort of weird that Magritte’s painting has never stopped being popular. You see it, or some version of it, everywhere. And it always sort of tickles you, doesn’t it?

I suspect it’s because it is a lesson that has a hard time sticking. Sure, the cortex, our art history lobe, gets it, and yawns, “whatever.” But our limbic lizard brain, like some internal uneducated dumbass, cannot not see a goddamn pipe floating there and still keeps scratching his head over the contradiction. There’s a pipe. But he’s saying it’s not a pipe. Wha’?

Are we that stupid? Don’t we get it already?

Two of my favorite films remind me that no, we do not get it.

We’ve all played the Blade Runner drinking game, where one person drinks a shot every time they see evidence in the film that Deckard is really a replicant, and the other person drinks a shot whenever they find evidence he’s really a human. Well, maybe I’m the only person who plays that drinking game (playing both sides simultaneously). But few films inspire–or used to inspire–such avid debate by fans.

If you’re clever, there are lots of opportunities to drink a “he’s a replicant” shot: Rachel’s “have you ever taken that test yourself?,” Gaff’s origami unicorn and his “You’ve done a man’s job, sir,” at the end. Or, if you’re not so clever (as I wasn’t, the first ten or so times I saw the film), you can watch the movie and have it never occur to you that Deckard might be (gasp) one of the very androids he’s assigned to kill. But even if your cleverer friends laugh at you for being so naïve, you can counterargue that the film is much less poignant if it’s just about a robot who falls in love with a robot. Isn’t the whole moral of the story that maybe humans and robots aren’t so different, that we’re all in the same boat when it comes to love and death?

Making us question whether Deckard “really is” a replicant or “really is” a human is exactly what Ridley Scott wanted viewers to do. He has said as much. All the bits of evidence one way or the other are placed there deliberately, and he made some of his revisions in The Director’s Cut to actually bring the question of Deckard’s identity into clearer focus (the added unicorn sequence, for example—is it an implanted memory or just a metaphor??).

You could sort of compare Deckard to one of those visual illusions that can be seen two ways—one second it’s a duck, the next it’s a rabbit. E.H. Gombrich, writing about the psychology of such illusions, argued that humans can’t help but see them as either-or; you can’t see both a duck and a rabbit at the same time, you see them flop back and forth. But the philosopher Wittgenstein disagreed; he said it is possible, if you try real hard, to say “Well, actually, it’s a duck-rabbit.” Deckard is basically a duck-rabbit. If you try real hard, you can step back, stop drinking, and realize he’s neither human nor replicant. He is a fictional character. There’s no final truth of the matter, no more in the film than what we actually see. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

Mulholland Drive is the other great solitary drinking game movie. But it’s also one of the most “sociable” films David Lynch has made. One of the best things about it is the conversations it gets one to have with friends who’ve either hated it or been moved by it or both. Like Blade Runner, Mulholland Drive lures us into having conversations about what’s “actually real” in the movie and what parts are “not real,” and to figure out how the not real stuff fits into the real stuff (or vice versa). Is the whole first part of the film a dream and the second part reality? Is the first part the wish-fulfilling rationalization of the murder in the second part? Is fantasy/dream interwoven with reality throughout the whole film? Is Rita “really” just a version of Betty/Diane? It’s impossible not to bite, to play these “which part’s real?” games. As with Blade Runner, figuring out the truth feels important, not just like an empty intellectual exercise, because, however you slice it, there’s a real emotional core to the story. Parts of the film are really moving and heartbreaking. Like witnessing a car wreck, it’s hard sitting back and not getting involved.

Ultimately, all such discussions of the “reality” of Mulholland Drive lead to the Club Silencio scene. A trumpet player comes out on stage playing his instrument, but then he stops playing and the music continues. “No hay banda,” the master of ceremonies explains, “There’s no orchestra. It’s all a recording.” Then, a singer (Rebekah del Rio) comes out on stage and gives a wrenchingly emotional rendition of Roy Orbison’s song “Crying,” and at last collapses – again, her voice continuing with the song. We feel suddenly like real idiots, because we are just as shocked this time as we were just minutes ago with the trumpet player. It’s like we’ve learned nothing. We feel chastised, like a bad student.

Lynch is beating us retards over the head with the fact that nothing is real in this film. It’s not the depressed and brokenhearted Diane, alone and blowing her brains out in her apartment at the end, who is the “real” woman. She’s a lure for our belief, just like the mascara-dripping sad singer on the stage, before she collapses. Give up on either of them, on any of it, being real. Clearly, Lynch really really wants us to get this message. It’s important we get it, just like it’s important that Betty and Rita really get it, and from their tears watching the singer collapse in Club Silencio, you can tell that it hits them hard.

What is so important about this message though? Is Lynch just making some kind of clever philosophical statement about Art? I don’t think so—Lynch is more serious (and even down-to-earth) than that. So is Ridley Scott. And so was Magritte. Could it instead be that, by making us see our own complicity in being fooled by a movie or a painting, these guys were trying to show us something about life and our own complicity in being fooled there too?

Maybe we need to keep going back and repeating this lesson—go back to Club Silencio and re-learn the lesson of the collapsed singer on the stage. Oh right! It’s not real! And then keep re-learning it. Maybe eventually it will stick.

How many times in the history of ufology has flip derision been the media’s or the government’s reaction? Arizona Governor Fife Symington’s farcical, dismissive news conference after the Arizona Lights incident, for example (as shown in James Fox’s terrific documentaries Out of the Blue and I Know What I Saw). Or the vaguely comedic spin given to UFO stories in the media (see Richard Dolan’s essay, “How to Marginalize an Astronaut”). Dismissive reactions by the media are often attributed to the long history of government or military interference and manipulation aimed to discredit the phenomenon (and thereby keep it out of public consciousness, other than as a joke). But I don’t think it is necessary to always invoke “the government” to explain the belittling of UFOs and ufology.

Although I have no doubt that government manipulation has occurred and still occurs—Dolan’s UFOs and the National Security State, Volumes I and II, document it extensively (and depressingly)—I suspect the reasons the mainstream media and even just “people on the street” fail to take the subject of UFOs seriously is somewhat less sinister: the plain human unpreparedness to confront troubling philosophical subjects. People are quite happy accepting that UFOs may be real and that we are not alone, but they don’t want to have to think about the implications until absolutely necessary.

It’s a normal way of dealing with big and traumatic subjects. Death is a good example: We all can accept “intellectually” our own mortality, but most of us go about our daily lives pretending it won’t happen to us and not facing squarely its significance. Whether it is because it is upsetting, or because we just don’t feel philosophically up to the task, or because we are just lazy, we don’t think about death except in the abstract unless and until we are forced to. More often, we make jokes and belittle the subject. Gallows humor.

The probable existence (and possible presence) of much-more-advanced or intelligent beings is perhaps not on par with death, but as worldview-altering truths go, it is not too far from the top. Consequently, busy people deal with it the way they deal with other philosophically complicated matters they really don’t know how to confront squarely at the time—they laugh it off. To his credit, Symington, who was among the many astonished witnesses of the lights over Phoenix that night in 1997, later acknowledged that his flippant news conference had sort of this motivation.

Frustration at this apparent dismissiveness inspires ufologists to want to shake the public’s lapels, but they should recognize that people are probably more affected by the subject than they let on. Ordinary people just don’t want to have to get serious, then and there, in public, about something they are not prepared to get serious about.

Even the most rationalistic and empirically minded people are fundamentally governed by nonrational principles such as aesthetics. Like the rest of us–though they may not acknowledge it–even “hard scientists” are guided in their inquiries and in their interpretations by what feels most elegant and beautiful and right.

It is hard not to appreciate the elegance and beauty of the standard SETI picture of extraterrestrial civilizations: They are distant, ancient, and serene. “Contact” will take the form of radio signals sent years or centuries or millennia ago “across the sea of space.” It is a picture I like to call the “scientific sublime,” and Carl Sagan was its great prophet for a generation of young would-be scientists. Every Sunday morning we were glued to PBS, watching Sagan sail his “ship of the imagination” to the stars and explore the “intricate machinery of life,” and we felt inspired by this vast cosmic vision and the weirdly inspiring sense of the insignificance of ourselves and humanity.

Freud wrote of the “oceanic feeling” that stimulated religion. Sagan was a kind of prophet of science-as-religion; you could get that oceanic feeling from thinking about space and time and the incredible complexity of nature. (The recent “Symphony of Science” remixes of Cosmos and other classic science programs are nice reminders of this.)

In other words, the cosmos was, in Sagan’s picture, like God—a God we could actually believe in and celebrate because he was essentially indifferent to our tiny affairs. Throughout his career, Sagan was highly dismissive of UFOs, even though he acknowledged that it was statistically probable the earth would be visited by extraterrestrial explorers every 20,000 years or so.

I suspect this cherished sense of man’s insignificance in the cosmos is at the root of many scientists’ dismissal of UFOs: It simply violates their sense of aesthetics. It seems like a B-movie version of a state of affairs (“we are not alone”) that ought to be far stranger, far more awe-inspiring and serene. And it feels distressingly (and dangerously) human-centric, flying in the face of the wise and ethically inspiring cosmic vision Sagan and other proponents of SETI preached—the earth as a vulnerable tiny blue speck in the vast cosmos.

Other intelligences, in this view, should be far, far away, not buzzing around our planet like gnats. Alien minds should be contemplating the incredible intricacy of nature, the mysteries of existence, amid inconceivable monuments of glass and stone, not furtively spying on our army bases, molesting our livestock, and abducting suburbanites. An ET presence among us feels cheap and tawdry, deflating that sublime sense of distance and scale.

The “UFO movement” (to slap a label on something that is highly diverse and varied, I realize) tends to contain a lot of highly human-centric assumptions. Almost any interpretation of the phenomenon assumes that humans figure in the plans of higher beings, or that they want something from us, or that they are intensely interested in us. If abductees are to be believed, aliens want to do things with, or take things from, our bodies, or they want to breed with us; perhaps they “need” our genetic diversity, or want to control us by creating some kind of alien-human hybrid. More optimistically, they are preparing to contact us and share their knowledge with us. Or they are here to protect us from destroying ourselves. Or they want to elevate us, facilitate our evolution to a higher, “posthuman” state, like the slabs in 2001.

In short, UFOs encourage us to think of ourselves and our planet as special—which, unfortunately, is a dangerous and retrograde perception—a throwback to the Middle Ages.

Is it possible to accept the UFO phenomenon and also somehow preserve the sublimity that Sagan preached? Some ufologists potentially do so by departing from the ET hypothesis. Mac Tonnies, for instance, thought UFOs could be “cryptoterrestrial” rather than extraterrestrial. Yet, he also liked the alternative view that they represented an ancient machine intelligence, and also blogged intelligently (and wrote a book) about the possibility of ancient ruins on Mars—more sublime visions. Jacques Vallee likewise believes UFOs may be far stranger than anything we can imagine–psychological or interdimensional entities–but that they don’t represent beings from outer space.

There may be no single answer to the UFO question. It’s quite possible or even probable that we’re not even talking about a single phenomenon. But I do think that much if not all of what we are dealing with represents beings that are more or less indifferent to our affairs or our existence. This indifference, to me, preserves at least some of the sublimity of whatever vast and ancient intelligences UFOs might represent.

The time has come for a new Copernican Revolution. Such a revolution would be, not merely a realization and understanding of our place in the order of things, but a true coming-to-grips which painfully and profoundly reorders our thinking. The realization must be this: Humans are not the apex of sentience or consciousness or intelligence or evolution. We are not forerunners in our universe, but latecomers. I’m hardly the first to say this, but it bugs me that even people who agree with this view “intellectually” still don’t bother to seriously grapple with its existential implications.

As I’ve written here, many sensible, scientifically minded people are persuaded of the validity of thousands of well-documented UFO encounters throughout the latter part of the 20th century (and even before). But it is not necessary to accept this evidence to still accept the likelihood that we have been visited by advanced ETs. Statistics alone—i.e., the Drake equation and its variants—dictates that this state of affairs is highly likely, even if “they” have never shown themselves or sent us radio signals. ET neighbors (or their machines) will have had ample time—millions or billions of years—to master interstellar flight that approaches or exceeds the speed of light; there has been ample time for they or their probes to propogate across the galaxy; incredibly advanced technology ensures that such beings or their machines will have the ability to manufacture new probes from local materials and that such probes would be inconspicuous if they wish to be. If we have near or more distant neighbors that are thousands or millions of years in advance of us, it only makes sense that our existence and our progress as a species would be monitored.

Besides the statistics of the matter, I do accept the UFO “best evidence.” Of course, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is not the only legitimate explanation for UFOs. Other speculations include that “UFO pilots” come from other dimensions, from our own future, or that they are more-advanced hominids, “cryptoterrestrials” as Mac Tonnies called them, that live secretly on earth. (It’s not an absurd proposition: If isolated pockets of “slightly less advanced” hominids like Sasquatch exist—and it is surely at least possible—why not “more advanced” ones that have already mastered space travel and choose to remain hidden?) These are all possibilities, but it is hard not to find the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis most parsimonious, and the one that best fits with our current understanding of physics and astronomy. And in any case, other explanations would not alter my fundamental point here: We are not assuredly and perpetually, and perhaps not even now, masters of our fate. Homo sapiens is not the only game in town, and we’re way behind the curve in terms of the level of our civilization and our technology.

In speculating about “their” motives, whoever they are, I think the most parsimonious line of thinking is, again, simply to extrapolate from the present—in this case, what we know about our own scientific and security motives. Long-term monitoring of human affairs—what could be called “deep anthropology”—would most plausibly be motivated by the likelihood that humans will one day be astropolitically relevant or even a potential threat. If they are ETs, that time is surely long in the future—hundreds or thousands of years from now—yet deep anthropology would be a totally sensible insurance policy. In a millennium or so, our spacefaring descendents’ every move will be totally predictable due to the vast amounts of data on our species already accumulated and stored and analyzed. (Analyzed for patterns of which, in our commitment to a belief in free autonomous will—human unpredictability—most nonscientists would prefer to deny the existence.) Many of the best-attested UFO reports, having occurred near political centers and military bases, near space flights and missile launches, and in the context of air warfare and maneuvers, bear out such an interest in our military development and behavior.

I know the view I’m expressing will seem paranoid, although on the paranoia scale I consider myself only about a middling 5 or 6. I think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone; I don’t think the Knights Templars have any modern relevance. And as a very minor blogger, I’m not so paranoid as to think I actually have more than about one or two readers. Again, I base my “extraterrestentialist” argument partly on the simple statistics about what most probably is the state of affairs in our galaxy.

The lack of radio evidence, cited by SETI proponents, is no counterargument: Why would advanced civilizations necessarily still communicate in the radio band? Highly directional lasers (or something else we don’t even know about yet) are more likely. Civilizations like ours that do go through a “radio phase” probably do so for just a few hundred years, or less, and the probability of “radio simultaneity” (adjusting for the speed of light, of course) is infinitesimal—precisely the lack of technological parity that dictates at least some of our interstellar neighbors are going to be wildly in advance of us. What the standard Drake equation fails to factor in is the certainty that civilizations will not arise contemporaneously. And obviously the Fermi Paradox—“if there are so many of them out there, why haven’t they gotten in touch”—a priori denies the validity of the substantial UFO evidence that they are already here. They simply have no interest in actually contacting us. Why would they?

Radio is relevant, though, in the opposite direction: If UFOs really did begin to visit in droves only in the forties (and thus that it wasn’t merely an artifact of increased air travel or Cold War paranoia), radio explains it: This is about the time it would have taken for our first radio transmissions to have reached the nearest star systems and whatever listening posts may exist in our immediate stellar neighborhood, and then for the first visitors or probes to arrive here to investigate.

I am paranoid enough to accept that “the government” has more knowledge of ET visitation than the general public, and has done its best to cover up what it knows. The intense interest in UFOs by at all levels of the government and military since the 1940s has been extensively documented by Richard Dolan (UFOs and the National Security State). The reasons for such a coverup are perfectly sensible, and they are even a matter of public record. In a report commissioned by NASA in 1961, the Brookings Institution warned that awareness of more advanced civilizations  would possibly undermine social cohesion. The report consequently suggested that government should consider maintaining secrecy about extraterrestrials should their existence become evident. The recommendation was based in part on the advice of no less an authority on intercultural contact than the anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Homo sapiens really is in the position similar to that of the stone-age tribes of Melanesia and Polynesia when the metal birds of the White men first visited them early in this century. Like those tribes, many people nowadays have developed harmful beliefs in the beneficence of extraterrestrial visitors—expecting ETs to bring us boons, as in Close Encounters, or (as in 2001) to be interested in our protection from ourselves or in our elevation to a higher consciousness. In Melanesia, such widespread expectations took the form of cargo cults; in his book Messengers of Deception, the eminent astronomer-cum-UFOlogist Jacques Vallee (the basis for the Lacombe character in Spielberg’s film) writes about such beliefs, and such movements, as they already exist on the fringes of American and European society. He worries that such beliefs could be used by very earthly groups for purposes of manipulation.

As I’ve suggested, it is much more likely that extraterrestrials (or their automated machines, if that’s what most UFOs turn out to be) are as indifferent to our affairs as biologists are to the animals they study, or as CIA analysts are even to the most backward societies they monitor. Even tribal people in Pakistan could pose a threat if they acquired weapons of mass destruction, so our analysts study them with an eye to our nation’s long-term security interests. Advanced civilizations will, similarly and sensibly, always be planning for their long-term safety, preparing for any long-term contingency. Any “latecoming” civilization’s acquisition of spacefaring and destructive technology would be such a contingency.

And lest we think we’re special in posing a future threat, statistics also dictates that we are probably only one of hundreds or thousands of civilizations in our galaxy in the same less-than-enviable situation of being monitored indifferently for “future relevance.”

I think it behooves us to really think about this likelihood, and thus ponder anew our place in the universe. Because of our almost-certain lateness on the galactic scene, humans will likely always find ourselves in a position of deference to far more advanced beings. Should this depress us? Only if we continue our present beliefs about our (high) place in the order of things. Despite the sense of insecurity it may engender, realization and acceptance of this reality should supplant willful ignorance or denial. It will have to happen sooner or later that we accept we are not the center of “God’s creation,” any more than the sun or the earth are such a center. We withstood the latter realization in the Middle Ages, and will likely do so again. We are resilient, after all. I suggest that only the humbling (yet also sublime) realization of our relative insignificance in the order of things will allow our further development and evolution as a species.

ETs aren’t about to contact us, and they have zero interest in lifting us to a higher plane of consciousness so we can be their friends. It’s up to us to lift ourselves. But acknowledgement that ETs really exist, right in our own backyard, can help us do that. Coming to grips with the reality that our species is not only cosmologically insignificant but also “exoanthropologically” backward is itself an incentive to get our collective act together, get serious, and evolve.

Richard Rorty died. I’m rereading his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity in the light of Zizek. These two were always my philosophical bookends. Now the books fall over on one side.

I never saw and still don’t see how Rorty is assailable. I don’t see how pragmatism is assailable, within the terms given by philosophy. How can metaphysics be defended without an appeal to something (faith, God, whatever) outside of ideas, outside of language, that all present agree upon? Without God or capital-T Truth, there’s no rock on which to found a metaphysics. You can only do it with faith.

So the inconsistency, the non-sew-up-able-ness of the public and private, is just what it says. If Zizek disagrees it is over the nature of the public and its hold over the individual, questioning the nature of the divide, the gulf, the split, the inconsistency. He wants to cross and criss-cross it with webs of Lacan, Hegel, whatnot. But there is a common ground between them in the existence of the divide and its irrationality.

For Rorty, you start from where you are, which is your political philosophy. Liberalism can’t be “proven.” It just is: it exists as an idea and as a more or less realistic option for society, and it has a tradition and a future, and if you hate cruelty more than anything, then you are a liberal. You start from there, in your political life. And there’s no making it consistent with your philosophy, your imagination, your vision of the self.

The thing “missing” in Rorty is an account of the remainder, the effect of the inconsistency, which is the production of monsters and repression and “sublime objects.” Zizek’s project used to be an accounting of the “surplus enjoyment” produced by liberal democratic society in the f

Parallax is really not new. In its social implications at least, it’s just a restating of the postmodernist truism: “There is no center.” That was always the motto, right? But we – or at least, I – always took that to mean a lack of a privileged social viewpoint, a lack of some Archimedian position from which to describe reality. But I now see that in that, my grad-school understanding was actually “just” the modernist “Truth is relative.”

But there’s another way in which the center is lacking, a more troubling way, and this is what Zizek means. There is no overlap, no point or touchstone of shared reality, some place in which we all agree and in which we are all the same.

This “center” I am trying to describe is a much vaguer place. But it is also, I am beginning to think, something we all need to believe in in order to live together, love one another, and so on. Without examining my belief in this center, I go through life trusting that, even though you and I are different, come from different places and have different experiences and agendas, there is some part of us that we share, and that we share with everybody else. A middle point that we all agree on. A compromise between/among us all. Such a place somehow guarantees and anchors our reality with other humans.

As I said, it is a vague idea, but if you examine yourself I think you will find it as an article of your private faith…

(I am thinking here of the overlapping circles on a Mastercard.)

To say “there is no center” is to give voice to the self-deception inherent in our belief in such a place. There is no “place between.” There is just you, and I, and him, and her, and so on, and no way in which we actually overlap, no point between us that guarantees our social relations or that makes some shared understanding possible. Our experiences of sharing and communion are really “just” neural firings in separate brains, disconnected in space and time.

We can’t experience other people’s happiness. I can’t necessarily “get” why a certain thing might make you happy, or sad, or angry. I am not you. I am not in your shoes.

This nonoverlapping of people is, I think, what some Marxists call “antagonism.”

Without a “place between,” what do we do? What do we do to maintain our faith in a center that doesn’t exist?

Reading Slavoj Zizek’s “magnum opus” The Parallax View. Mixed feelings, disappointment at its difficult philosophical tone, different from his more accessible early books. The main thing, though, is his “strategic decision” to use the term “parallax” to denote the discontinuity at the heart of being, the nonidentification of an object with itself (or a subject with him/herself). It’s a familiar Lacanian idea, but Zizek is now evidently centralizing it in his thought.

At first I was annoyed – it seemed wrong word choice. Parallax is just two different viewpoints on something, not a split in the thing itself. But I began to think of it more along the lines of W.J.T. Mitchell’s multistable images – like the duck/rabbit or the wife/mother-in-law. The point is, there is no “between” or neutral perspective on such an image (although Wittgenstein might disagree). It is either/or.

Plus, is it not the “split in oneself” (metaphorically, the fact that we see from two separate eyes, not one cyclopean eye mid-forehead) that gives rise to the “split in the world”?

That vertical line, that slash in either/or, is the impossible discontinuity in the world that Zizek has decided once and for all to erect his philosophical edifice on. It’s a good move. I just wish he’d go back to addressing a wider audience.

To be honest, I only got about 50 pages in and haven’t picked it up again.

I’m increasingly interested in Tolkien’s Catholicism. It is through his Letters that I first began to grasp the appeal of the notion of the Fall, which previously only ever seemed like the most stupid, harmful idea. Really, it’s just a way of describing our human tendency, the fact that we are less than what we would be, less than what we promise, and in our essence bound to disappoint ourselves. It depicts the inevitability of strife between our ideals and the world we actually end up creating.

We may impose or try to form ourselves with technology and techniques and raise ourselves, but there is a fundamental gravity, a weight pulling us to ourselves, to our “thrown” being. Gombrowicz would call this downward force “sub-culture” or “immaturity.” It is the realm of other things, distractions, minor obsessions, faults, secondary priorities, imps of the perverse, and what have you, that derail and deflect us, pull us down to another level. Despite the vastness of our hopes for ourselves, we end up ‘middling.’ (Tolkien loved middles, and saw redemption in them.)

It is easy to see ourselves as fallen. It is not so easy, at least without reminding ourselves, of the fallenness of others. When we look at other people’s lives, we see them as having chosen what they are and who they are. We see them as hard and definitive. They wear those clothes because they want to, we think; they work where they do because they must have wanted that more than anything else. We have no trouble blaming them for their mistakes, because they surely intended them. Yet when we look at our own lives, it is as through wholly different eyes. We see a random and haphazard and oftentimes ill-thought-out meandering of action and happenstance. The decisions we made we see as, more often than not, not our own, or not completely our own. We see how random and unchosen much of it is. The exceptions, those rare moments when we have felt like we have actually chosen our fate, stand out and make us feel proud. But they are the exceptions.

Why do we view ourselves through such different eyes? Why do we apply so sterner a metric to the lives of other people?

In a letter to Tolkien, Auden says he experiences life as a series of choices: “Life, as I experience it in my own person, is primarily a continuous succession of choices between alternatives.” That to me seems most enviable, most what I would aspire after, yet what seems so elusive that it may only come once in a blue moon (if ever) that one would actually feel one’s ability to choose among alternatives. Mostly don’t we just persist in life? Stay a course?Don’t our choices get buried under the weight of dead desire and necessity? Beethoven’s “Es muss sein!”?

Sartre or Freud would say that we are always choosing, and even our avoidance of choice is a choice.. But those are strenuous, basically Nietzschean philosophies, that belong in a sci-fi universe like Dune. I think, in reality, choice takes energy, and eventually everyone gets tired. To consciously live each moment as if it was a choice between alternatives, and that you always had it in you to make a choice (not just passively accept one), would be wonderful, but I don’t believe it can be done.It makes me distrust Auden, that maybe he is not so honest with himself.

Auden’s larger point was that such a sense of life—as choices—naturally produces the quest or journey as a literary form of expression. I think Tolkien’s point was that he produced a quest novel not out of some special sense of living life as choices (though that may be laudable) but from its being a tried and true way of stringing together the things that matter most to oneself. And, mainly, even more importantly, because a quest, however objectively small, takes you out of the passive condition. In effect, a quest makes you choose, makes you experience your life objectively.

So they are both saying the opposite—

Auden: Conscious living produces the Quest as its natural artistic form. Tolkien: The Quest produces the feeling of consciousness that most people, most of the time, lack. (Tolkien’s view is, as always, the more pragmatic and humane, and seems more right on.)

In his reply to the poet, Tolkien talked about people making themselves, his faith that some people do manage to create themselves. Yet the ordeal of Frodo, Sam and Golluum shows that this can only be achieved through other people. That’s the beauty and fascination of the story. It’s what Gombrowicz was always on about too, in his Diary: the redemptive possibility of people forming each other, even deliberately using other people who are unlike themselves (perhaps not too unlike, but just-right-unlike), to alter themselves in desired directions.To help them, in other words, choose themselves.

On the back cover of my Ballantine paperback edition of Dune, by Frank Herbert, is a review that sticks in my mind from my childhood: “I know nothing comparable to it except … the Lord of the Rings.” That ellipsis, I always imagined, was a dramatic pause.

Is Dune comparable to Tolkien’s masterpiece?

In the scale of the imagined world the author has created, and the endless dramatic and character possibilities, I suppose it is. And like Tolkien’s creation, Dune is a novel of ideas. Teenagers who read Herbert’s epic are enthusiastically devouring a philosophy. It happens to be a different philosophy from that of Tolkien, however, and one considerably less subtle. It is, in a word, Nietzcheanism.

The Nietzchean motto, “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,” imbues Dune. Rereading the book as an adult I was struck by how strenuous was its ethos. It is a picture of humans whose mental and physical skills have evolved to a diamond hardness, and who have found a congenial social structure in a sort of interplanetary Feudalism where the aristocratic few are well-insulated from the restless many. These future supermen are always on edge, always prepared, perfectly trained even down to their micro physiological processes. And it is all very tiring, exhausting to read about. You can barely get your breath.

The most emblematic image or moment in the novel—at least, the one that has always stood in my mind—is the Reverend Mother’s test of the young Paul with the Pain Box, right at the start of the book. He holds his hand in the box while she holds a poisoned needle at his neck; though the box creates a sensory illusion of terrific burning pain, the boy must master his impulse to withdraw his hand or she will prick him with the needle. “It kills only animals,” she explains of the poison (called “Gom Jabbar”)—the implication being that it is the true human who can master his body and therefore endure the pain, knowing that it is only an illusion. Anyone else, anyone who fails the test, is an “animal,” in the strenuous ethos of this hardened far future—or at least, in the strenuous ethos of the order of sisters that the Reverend Mother represents.

Paul, because he has been trained in mental and martial disciplines from earliest childhood—and also because he is genetically superior, a product of selective breeding through several millennia—is able to pass the test, and is therefore deemed truly human.

This image contains within it the Nietzchean ethos of the novel: to be human is to have mastery over oneself, to be skilled, to be patient, and through skill and patience to survive. The heroes of the book—Paul, his mother, the Fremen—know how to survive, and thereby defeat their enemies. Dune certainly contains its bad guys—paradigmatically the soft, hedonistic, ruthless homosexual Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. The good guys are quietly patient, exemplified by the Fremen hoarding water in secret for centuries in order to alter their planet’s ecosystem; there is the poetic image of the solitary willow bending to the wind whose seeds produce a forest that breaks the wind.

So for Herbert, Good, if we can call it that, is an attitude to power, not unlike that found in an Eastern morality tale. Patience, self-mastery, skill, and in the end, ruthlessness. In Dune, the secret substance of the universe, permeating everything, is power. Humanity is a kind of mastery of this power, a knowledge of it and an ability to control it via submission. Like judo.

In the Lord of the Rings, the secret occult substance permeating everything is … humanity itself. There is a kind of undeveloped or nascent humanity in the trees, the stones, in the orcs, in everything. And the quality that brings out this humanity, that realizes and actualizes it, is … what? What is the quality possessed by the heroes? Pity? Mercy? Nobility? It is something like this. It has something to do with nobility and honor and pity. Non-judgement. Even the most evil beings, they are part of a memory of pain, they started as better creatures and were corrupted in long ages past.It is a chain of imperfection. Everything falls along a chain, not of perfection but of imperfection. It is, in other words, the Fall.

So the philosophical contrast between Herbert and Tolkien boils down to this: In Dune, even most humans aren’t human. Most humans are animals. In the Lord of the Rings, many animals are human. Even plants. There is humanity even in evil.

It is often said that Tolkien’s books are about death. I think Tolkien’s books are about the specter of death, and about states of un-death that can be lived in life if you are not on your guard, or if you have endured too much suffering. The books make a thought experiment about death through the device of a race of people who are immortal and long to be able to die in the same way that mortal men long to be immortal.

For such a dark story, it is strange how few characters actually die in it. It seems (at least) like Tolkien was afraid of letting a character die. Characters fade away. Or sail away. And they have been around for a long, long time, so it’s not like they really had births or childhoods either. It seems like he was afraid of defining things at the edges. He is reluctant to show death in its senselessness. He is reluctant to show an ending of things. He had trouble ending his book. His stories, they fade out rather than terminate.

The races of beings that populate Middle Earth also share this quality. They are hard to define, ambiguous at the boundaries. And because of his reluctance to define and delineate, Tolkien propogates new and intermediate forms that plug the conceptual gaps. For every two kinds of thing in his world, there can be found a third thing between them, some intermediate phase in creation. There’s always this blending, forms merging one into another.

In this way, Tolkien was like Nature. Nature also, if you look closely, produces these intermediate forms, these secondary and tertiary forms of things, different in very slight ways. Middle Earth oddly resembles the natural world, with its astonishing spectra of species. What S.J. Gould called (referring to the Burgess Shale), “wonderful life.”

So Tolkien’s books are really about life, as much as they are about death. They are about the way things blend into things, and people blend into each other.

The chain of persons–Frodo, Sam, Gollum (or rather, Gollum, Frodo, Sam) is the central, most touching manifestation of this. Interdependence is a kind of blending and overlapping. Frodo is a kind of intermediate figure, holding in suspension the opposite forces or archetypes represented by Sam and Gollum. T. writes (in his letters) that the small and the human requires the noble, lest it fall into the base, just as the noble requires the small and the human lest it veer into arrogance. Or something like that. Thus, between Gollum the fallen and Sam who refuses to countenance him, there is Frodo who binds them both to himself. This relationship among these three characters is the human core of the whole trilogy.

The reality of things is, one person cannot reach across the chasm, yet by linking hands they can. Sam cannot “touch” Gollum himself, both are morally repugnant to the other. Frodo’s courage is seeing past the ring-spell of belief that the quest is, like the ring, “his own.” Seeing that he needs these two others and that the three of them form a chain of redemption. Thus, Gollum, Frodo, and Sam form a human chain. Chain. Change. Redemption (as in ex-change).

We all introduce something to someone else. We all are a conduit, a tube, that carries a thing to another thing (and thus god back to god, god back to godself).

Is the elevator operating? Is the elevator working?