On Verisimilitude

While I recognise that the makers of mediaeval and fantasy movies are not responsible for educating the populace about the realities of history, I think we miss out on a lot due to ingrained practices and a kind of incestuously lacklustre creative vision. Patrick Stuart made a typically interesting point in response to ideas I raised in my last post. Patrick raised the notion that the highly-individualised faux-armours worn by the characters in contemporary mediaeval cinema and television actually tell the story of those characters better than accurate armour would. My initial reaction was to disagree, but now I am not so sure. The issue is, in part, who the characters are, and in who’s imagined past are they living. If the details of the production design, as opposed to the action that takes place, is the key means by which the filmmakers convey the historical context within which the characters are embedded, then the historical context is of diminished importance. The characters may as well be anywhere or anyone else.

I reserve a particularly keen dislike for most contemporary genre filmmaking and almost all contemporary genre television, especially the mediaeval stuff. The primary reason for this dislike is the consistency with which it all behaves like a contemporary soap-opera with the same stock characters in mediaeval or fantasy films espousing values indistinguishable from those in sci-fi, which are, in turn basically the same as those in modern procedurals. This is, of course, mainly due to the fact that everyone wants the same gigantic audience that is literate in the dramatic language of the day. Not many people want to be barraged with the grotesque inconsistencies of real history. Not many people want to look at bad teeth. The imagined past of the people who bankroll big films and lush television is soul-suckingly pedestrian and LARPy. This is the boring reason.

A more pertinent reason I hate the stuff is that my crunchily details-obsessed mind seeks out the nuances of distinctly different material cultures that produce the wonder of marvellous estrangement in my admittedly childish heart. Historical people had less technology than we do but they relied on what they had just as much as we do. They were also no less clever. I’m not sure if it is possible to make a sword that is more effective than one made five hundred years ago.

A more realistic version of the past need not be a less beautiful version, or a less dramatic version. The story of real historical people (and their fantastic analogues) can be told by the things they carried.

Occasional versions of this stuff turns up in films. Think of the flying splinters in Master and Commander, shipboard combat was always exciting in previous films but the visceral horror of it had not, to my knowledge, been properly conveyed cinematically. It could be said the Master and Commander is a post-Saving Private Ryan film, and benefits from the revolutionarily elemental verisimilitude of that film, but there is a tradition in maritime stories of attention to evocative details. This is one of the many reasons I love Moby Dick.

Details;

It is a siege, a smoky hellscape of broken barricades and grimy soldiers cowering behind mantlets beneath a rain of arrows. The pagan enemy below are singing. A grizzled captain of the defenders stands above the parapets and roars his speech of defiance and encouragement, arrows strike and catch in his mail but he ignores them or sweeps them away with his sword.

Meanwhile, creeping through the barbican beyond the shattered gate, hot sand is poured through the murder-holes. One soldier has a shield above his head and the sand pours harmlessly off. Another has sand go down his neck, underneath his armour. He sizzles and smokes and screams.

Two longships row through dense fog, the leading ship is full of proud and haughtily moustachioed warriors who refuse to listen to the wisdom of the crusty old gaffers in the other ship. The gaffers use a sunstone to find the sun and determine their orientation. They turn aside from the edge of the world. The haughty ones sail over.

TV gets some things right

A woman arrayed in gleaming harness battles an ogre on a narrow path on the side of a volcano, the ogre breaks her sword with a great stone hammer. She grabs the beast and throws herself off the edge and they fall and tumble together down the jagged scarp, smashing into rubble and shards of volcanic glass. They lie still together at the bottom, the ogre is cut to ribbons and his brains are coming out. The woman groans and gets up to dust herself off. Her armour is scratched and dented but she seems unharmed. She gets up and falls over, too dizzy to walk. Another ogre is picking his way gingerly down the slope.

A warrior with a thick gambeson, assailed by war dogs, has a snarling dog hanging from each sleeve, laughs and kicks awkwardly at them. A third dog comes running.

A scullion-wench is chased over boggy ground by shepherds on stilts.

A battle rages about the site of the construction of a cathedral, the villain escapes by being winched by treadwheel crane, hilariously slowly, up to the flying buttresses. The heroes have to fight his loyal henchmen inside the treadmill and upon the soaring architecture while the villain hurls gargoyles down from above.

A murky village in which a trial is taking place. The accused: a pig in a dress with a human mask, charged with the murder of a human infant. She has no defence and is found guilty.

A company of heavy cavalry try to close formation as a band of outriders come thundering over the hill with barefoot hippodromoi at their heels, holding on to the horses’ tails and bounding along at great speed. The outriders wheel but the runners keep running, using their speed and momentum  to tumble and duck below swords and gut and hamstring mercilessly.

A slave rebellion, the city is burning. A pair of cruppellarii stride impervious down a cobbled street. The city guard break spears and arrows on their armour and the gladiators murder them with impunity until some clever bastard commandeers a stack of tent poles and the guards batter them to the ground, pinning them like writhing animals until someone has the courage to stick a knife through their eye slits.

I used to think they didn't invent armour like this 'til a thousand years later.

Hurlbats.

Scaphism.

A lull in the raging battle and the enemy line parts with drilled precision to reveal a line of a hundred handgunners with sizzling fuses. They touch fire to barrel and the weapons go off with a crackling roar. The defenders look down at themselves with incredulity. No-one is hurt.

Slight Caveat: As aspie as I am, I feel like there are innumerable exceptions to the stance I have taken. I feel like the Macbeth film that is coming up with Michael Fassbender is going to be awesome in spite of the blatant inaccuracies of the production design (also maybe due to my slight man-crush on Fassbender from Frank and Shame). This, I am sure, will work because Shakespeare is so stylised, that it can be equal parts twenty-first and seventeen and eleventh century and still be so good because it is about the universal truths of human existence. There is also an irony to that kind of visual stylisation that is something I strive for, though I feel it is easy to be too arch and mannered and coy about the layers of meaning you are trying to convey.

I don’t know really. Haven’t seen the movie. Fucking awesome trailer, though.

One more thing. There has been recent discussion about how helmets make you head look big and dwarf your face or anonymise, which tends to relegate the wearer to villain-status or vulnerable underlingdom, and are thrown off by heroes at the first opportunity. If Fassbender were not contractually obliged to wear this thing by layers of intellectual property law, there's no way they would make him. 

Apocryphal Armour

There is a small subset of internet nerds who dislike the use of the term chainmail. The problem is that it is tautological. Mail means armour made from a matrix of metal rings linked together to form a flexible mesh. Adding descriptors to mail as a means of describing other forms of armour, as though mail just means armour, dates back, like most forms of academic silliness, to the 19^th century.

The 19^th century was a time when Victorian gentlemen were collecting and cataloguing things with gay abandon.  Among these was Samuel Rush Meyrick. Meyrick was active during the first half of the 19^th century in the field of mediaeval history. He was a renowned cataloguer of armour and has this marvellous British Celtic helmet that looks like a backwards baseball cap made of bronze named after him.

Meyrick was something of a taxonomic splitter. Generally speaking, the world is made up of two kinds of taxonomists; those who see similarities as being most important, and those who see differences as being more compelling. It is tempting at times to characterise the splitters as being more creative and perhaps more adventurous, always out to prove that there are new things under the sun. It can also be tempting to see the lumpers as being like the researchers that were determined to convince everyone that the extraordinary revelation of the discovery of Homo floresiensis was a mistake, and that the remains found were just some unusually small microcephalic individuals who happened to have inhabited the same area over the course of a few tens of thousands of years. In Meyrick’s case , however, the splitting was ill-advised.

Meyrick collected armour and classified it according to the established systems of the day. For the majority of the armour he was able to collect – predominantly plate armours – this was easy, plate armour lasts a long time and was fairly well documented. As he was putting together his extravagantly named work of a lifetime; A critical enquiry into antient armour as it existed in Europe, but particularly in England, from the Norman conquest to the reign of King Charles II, with a glossary of military terms of the middle ages, he found it necessary to write about the armour that existed before plate armour. To do so he relied upon secondary sources - there is actually very little armour in existence from the early Middle Ages as it has mostly rusted away and fallen apart, and documents from the period are not particularly specific about the kinds of technical details he required. As a result he had to look at manuscripts, at tomb effigies and to a very large extent at the embroidered warriors of the Bayeux Tapestry. Whether because different embroiderers worked on different parts of the Bayeux Tapestry or whether there was an active attempt by the individuals concerned to vary the patterns used to depict what would have been many similarly mail-clad warriors, the result was a wide variety of patterns sewn upon the forms of the warriors. Meyrick seems to have had one of those proliferating imaginations as he was able to take simple patterns and extrapolate to quite ridiculous extents.

The results of Meyrick’s extrapolations from simple stylistic conventions was a variety of different forms of apocryphal armour. These misinterpretations were notable in being wrong in a number of quite detailed ways which I can only assume to be the work of a dishonest man, or a foolish individual so absorbed in his theories as to allow himself to be swept away.

Meyrick saw, in the simple and stylised embroidery and in similarly simple and stylised illustrations and carvings, what looked like this;

From these he postulated eight different types of “mail”; ringed mail, mascled mail, trelliced mail, rustred mail, chain mail, banded mail, tegulated mail and scale mail. Of these, two actually existed. “Chainmail” was almost certainly what the vast majority of these images depicted – Meyrick had allowed the artistic conventions to feed his confabulatory obsessions. Scale armour was a variant of lamellar armour, lamellar was actually rather common in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, and was included as part of the composite forms of protection in Japanese armours. Scale armour is significantly less common, even to the extent that I think it is probably safe to say depictions of what look like scale in Western Europe were probably lamellar.

From the Bayeux. Note: That's Bishop Odo on the left starting the myth that clerics could only use blunt weapons

So, the apocryphals consist of;

Ringed mail, Which found its way into AD&D as ring mail and is probably the most common form of bullshit pseudo-armour depicted in movies and TV. There is a real version of this but it is Asian and relatively modern so no banana.

Absolute bullshit

Mascled mail: in which diagonal crosshatching is interpreted to be overlapping lozenge-shaped metal plates sewn to a leather backing. Not unreasonable except that it was poor interpretation of insufficient evidence and wrong.

Trellised mail: this is particularly egregiously confabulatory, from the third pattern across Meyrick concocted a form of armour that has square plates held between layers of leather by a central rivet and strips of leather between. This is essentially similar to a later form of armour known as brigandine, but there was, of course, woefully insufficient evidence for such a thing occurring in the eleventh century.

From this...

... we get the second from the left, note the detail above (nonsense). Also nonsense are numbers one and four (ringed mail and tegulated mail).

Rustred Mail is impossible to find an example of. I saw a 19^th century illustration once in an old children’s encyclopaedia (Newne’s Pictorial Knowledge). I have looked for it but cannot find it. It is ridiculous to think that someone “figured out” rustred mail existed and others believed him. Rustred mail is big overlapping rings that hang down over one another. It did not occur to Meyrick that the reason people use rings in armour is the whole interlinking thing. He somehow assumed people tried various other configurations before linking them together.

This is a terrible image

Banded mail gets interpreted in AD&D as being something akin to the laminated armour cataphracts wore on their arms and legs but in Meyrick’s nomenclature it refers to a misinterpretation of this simplified and stylised way of depicting ordinary mail.

Like the hauberk of the bloke battering the muscular baby to death

Cataphract on the left is fighting a man from the future, there is no banded mail in this picture

There is a possible thread of truth in forms of conventional mail with leather thongs threaded through as a means of stiffening collars and such.

Tegulated mail is what Meyrick got out of crosshatching or brickwork patterns where the lines are vertical and horizontal. His creative interpretation of this is of square or rectangular plates riveted or sewn to a backing. This would actually not be an especially bad interpretation save that he had insufficient evidence to assert that it occurred where he asserted that it occurred.

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Notice his hose are also tegulated

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Now what is the harm done by a few creative interpretations? Isn’t all history interpretation? I don’t think any great harm has been done by Meyrick’s confabulatory assertions but that there was an influence is certain. In addition to being the heyday of collection and categorisation, the 19^th century in England was a time of significant mediaeval revivalism. There was something about mediaeval folks in general and about Vikings in particular that stirred the romantic spirit of the age. Time was beginning to move forward more quickly and as the landscape changed, the figures who had been imagined to exist within the fading world were all the more poignant reminders of what had been lost. In short, the reasons for the 19^th century mediaeval revival are the same as the reasons why fantasy is popular now: yearning for what has been lost.

The textural embellishments provided by Meyrick’s confabulatory misinterpretations enriched the cultural image of the mediaeval world and were taken up, as with other things like horned helmets and double-headed axes, as being an essential part of the mediaeval world. They were embraced for much the same reason they were depicted as they were on the tapestry, because people found a monotonously mailed mediaeval Europe unacceptable. They still do. Look at the ways mediaeval armour is depicted in film and television and the underlying principle of Meyrick’s work and the textures that inspired it still applies. In mediaeval films textural variety is more important than historical accuracy or even plausibility. The Viking as depicted in contemporary cinematic culture is not so far removed from the Sturm und Drang romanticism of the 19^th century, and is even more clearly influenced by the twentieth century romantic counter-cultural movements of hippiedom, punk, heavy metal and biker culture in which individuality within accepted parameters is the hallmark of status. In such a paradigm it becomes necessary to invent various means of distinguishing between warriors, and I use the term advisedly - soldiers are allowed to dress the same, warriors must be distinct in order to personify notions of individuality.

Note the number of different textures and means of fastening

There is another aspect to this subject that is a little harder to pin down. In addition to the need to distinguish between fiercely independent heroic warriors, Meyrickian armours have about them a kind of contructivist quality, which is heightened and honed in cinematic and illustrated depictions. This is particularly the case in depictions of Viking and other “barbarian” armours, the individuality of the designs suggest a series of individual makers working independently of the dictates of an oppressive civilisation. The individuality of the textures is talismanic, the protection they grant is symbolic. This is especially the case in the contemporary TV series about Viking called The Vikings, in which every warrior wears a differently textured garment, none of which are explicitly demonstrated as providing protection against weapons but are each encoded with the idea of armour-ness. What armour actually did in historical contexts is not depicted so the armour is reduced to a sign. The constructivist quality intensifies this, the foregrounded materiality that is such an integral component of what we see as the pre-industrial past. In reality the so-called Dark Ages were not so rough-hewn, as even a casual perusal of the treasures of Anglo-Saxon England will reveal. Our view of the past dictates that it must be so. 

The old fella on the left's armour is recycled from Dragonheart

Confabulated mail, mail,Confusticated mail

These textures serve only to demonstrate that these are individual badasses

These dragonslayers are awesome

On Fantasy

As I see it, there are two main strands of speculative fiction: that in which there is some degree of pretence that things certain historical peoples were deluded about were actually true, and that in which wholly speculative propositions are made that nobody has ever believed were true. This distinction can usefully be applied to differentiate science fiction from fantasy but there are obviously differing degrees to which individual texts are bound by these categories. Fantasy is predominantly a projection back into a historical-credulity-space in which belief in gods, magicians, fairies and demons are taken to be truth, whereas sci-fi mines a futuristic-speculation-space in which the assumed position is that certain predictions made about the future have come to pass. There is a tendency for fantasy to be less concerned with working out the possible ramifications of the fantastic elements than science fiction is with its speculative elements but that broad generalisation is subject to innumerable specific variations.

It is fantasy that I am most interested in, and for reasons which may be different than most. In his essay Epic Pooh, Michael Moorcock offers a criticism of elements of Tolkienesque epic fantasy as inherently conservative and reactionary, a means of mollycoddling the bourgeoisie with comfortable lies about the world. While Moorcock was primarily concerned with the political and social, rather than the ontological, an argument can be made that fantasy represents a kind of atavistic reality, one in which modern systems of categorisation are discarded in favour of something altogether more archaic. As an avowedly sceptical atheist I find the idea of actually believing the things mediaeval humanity believed to be distasteful, but at the same time find the fact that they actually did believe them fascinating. Adopting the everything-they-believed-was-true approach allows me to take the much-maligned role of the cultural coloniser, patronisingly aping the attitudes of a non-privileged other with an aplomb granted by the fact that the patronised, culturally-colonised other is largely extinct. This fact of their extinction also allows me to venture, unmolested by judgment, into scathing criticism and parody of the abhorrent attitudes mediaeval people held with regards to women, sexual servitude, torture, violence as entertainment, racism, abject thraldom to monolithic religion, cruelty to almost everything and intolerance of everything else. Of course, the everything-they-believed-was-true approach also falls foul of inherent contradictions when the heterogeneous nature of real historical cultures and their beliefs is taken into account. It can’t all be true.

My view of mediaeval people as predominantly ignorant creates an interesting paradox in terms of my attitude to the fantasy genre. If fantasy is to be believed, mediaeval people were not mistaken in their positions with regards to fairies and wizards. A rarely asked but very interesting question arises. If, in the context of the narrative, they are right about wizards, what else are they right about? The answer offered by lazy fantasy writers - the least interesting answer - is that the people of the fantasy world are indistinguishable from modern rational sceptics in Ren Faire costumes. These people understand their world in much the same way educated westerners of the late 20^th to early 21^st century understand it. Their belief in the existence of magic is supported by empirical observation. They believe in deities whose powers are demonstrably real. They believe in supernatural monsters who exist in an ecology alongside conventional creatures and whose supernatural powers are naturally occurring phenomena. Within this understanding of the fantasy world superstition is fact and therefore does not exist. All of which makes their world more rational than the real world. Which robs it of some of its wonder, to be sure, and also robs it of much of its perilous strangeness, which simply won’t do.

There are varying levels to which it is possible to take the apocryphal claims of mediaeval people as fact. I would argue that the further you allow yourself to travel down the rabbit hole of the mediaeval paradigm, the weirder the world becomes and the weirder the people themselves become. In comparison Legolas Greenleaf, say, who is an immortal scion of a line whose ancestors lived  before the first rising of the sun, is less weird than a mediaeval Englishman who believed that geese grew on trees, intellectually disabled children are fairy changelings and that burning cats alive is hilarious. The problem remains, and is even compounded, if you grant all the claims made by mediaeval people as true. Take for granted, for example, that the claims made in mediaeval bestiaries, wherein the intrusive ubiquity of religious parable and a general off-the-wall silliness usurps all observational naturalism, and you have a world in which the camel and the leopard can breed and that is where giraffes come from, where panthers breathe an intoxicating sweet fragrance, where mice are spontaneously generated by the soil and many stranger things are true - the world is almost unrecognisable. There is an approach that is sometimes taken which is to have a bet each way, to allow that some of the irrational claims made by historical people are true in the context of the narrative but disallow others, or relegate them to a shrunken category of mere superstitions. This feels like compromise.

There was apparently a belief that beavers self-castrated to escape from hunters

One of the aspects of working within a mediaeval fantasy paradigm that I find as powerful as it is underutilised is what TV Tropes calls deliberate values dissonance. This is what is being employed when the writers of Mad Men make Don Draper, obviously a protagonist and therefore relatable, prone to historically consistent lapses into chauvinism and insensitivity, which make him more fully realised as a character, more matriculated into the internally-consistent structure of the milieux. In much the same way, it would ring false to me to write an urbane roguish swashbuckler in an Elizabethan London who eschewed the bear garden, had no scorn for the lower classes nor festering racism in his heart. There is no reason why ideologies cannot be critiqued without resorting to artificial constructs. The beauty of described worlds, like the beauty in all of art, exists independently of moral judgments. The entity to which one writes is a human first, and it is invariably insulting to that humanity to tell comforting lies about the nature of the world. This is essentially what Moorcock was driving at in his essay, though I do disagree with him about Tolkien I concur with the general thrust: fantasy need not be meek. To my mind, in order that those who people the world be in some way historically concordant with the beliefs that they held, beliefs which the author utilises in constructing the reality in which they are embedded, some degree of estrangement from contemporary morality needs to be in place. To live in a demon-haunted world is to be haunted by demons.

M. John Harrison, whose work I have only recently made happy acquaintance with, is renowned for the scorn he has for world-building. In his essay, Whatit might be like to live in Viriconium, Harrison describes how the role of the invented world is not to provide a consistently intelligible reality outside the parameters of the narrative. Of his invented city, Viriconium he writes; “it is not a place. It is an attempt to animate the bill of goods on offer. Those goods, as in Tolkien or Moorcock, Disney or Kafka, Le Guin or Wolfe, are ideological”. While he explicitly states that the purpose and function of invented worlds in gaming contexts is different from those in which fictional narratives are based I am going to conveniently ignore this fact, or at least pretend I am writing fiction, and allow some of the constraints to fall away. It does not matter, in the context of the narrative the structure of reality can fluctuate according to the needs of the narrative. Acknowledging the potential for the role of constraints in honing creativity, I can at the same time reject the constraints when rejection is necessary. Harrison does this effortlessly, Viriconium fluctuates according to the needs of the narrative. Whatever is on the bill of goods that needs animating, the city can be rewritten around those ideas the better to bear them along.

This attitude towards world-building is liberating. There is a quality to any exhaustively detailed world that is tiresome and false. No world can possibly be as detailed as Earth (literally, because all invented worlds are contained within Earth). There are always ragged boundaries at the end of the author’s endurance where things referred to are obviously just names with no substance behind them and no more narrative to make them resonant. Tolkien’s primary criticisms of invented languages like Volapük and Esperanto is that they had no legends to make them real. The entire corpus of Middle-Earth writings exist ostensibly so that Tolkien’s invented languages would feel more alive. I take the approach that because invented languages are difficult to animate with invented history and difficult also to construct with any degree of verisimilitude without considerable philological expertise and painstaking effort, I do not ever use invented words. The words I do use are very often obsolete dialect terms, and often applied to obscure folkloric concepts drawn from the well of things benighted people once believed. This constraint serves a number of purposes; I do not have to construct a language and the history of that language, I can avail myself of the robust interconnectedness and developed sound symbolism of existing language to embed the concept more fully into the world, I can encode extra layers of meaning into the names, and I can create refugia where otherwise extinct words can survive, however briefly, and be repurposed. The employment of obsolete obscurities is also part of a strategy of estrangement wherein I can subvert expectations about familiar things the better to lead toward the mystery I am trying to reveal.

That there is a persistent vocabulary that can be used to refer to things nobody still believes in is endlessly fascinating to me. The things people believed to be true seem to be epiphenomena deriving from our limited and biased perceptions of the world and our capacity for confabulation and exaggeration. That nobody ever saw a fairy is beyond doubt, the fact that people from innumerable cultures independently held firm convictions that there was an invisible race of others with potentially malign powers bears powerful testimony to the fact that, as concepts, as delusions and as components of language, fairies were (are) real. This list of legendary creatures from a compilation of British folkloric material known as the Denham Tracts, incidentally a source of speculation about origin of the word hobbit, testifies to the proliferation of terminology used to refer to things that never existed;

"What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals; when the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, Bloody Bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, spectres, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks, waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins, pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles, korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost. Nay, every lone tenement, castle, or mansion-house, which could boast of any antiquity had its bogle, its spectre, or its knocker. The churches, churchyards, and crossroads were all haunted. Every green lane had its boulder-stone on which an apparition kept watch at night. Every common had its circle of fairies belonging to it. And there was scarcely a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit!”

In spite of my scorn for the barbarisms committed by historical people I find the things they imagined to be true fascinating precisely because I am one of them. The archetypes of mythology exist as archetypes because they fulfil some primordial niche in the human imagination. It is for this reason that they persist. I am in the habit of engaging in recreational reductionism in a lot of contexts and I am especially fond of mocking humanity in its hubris. I think there is a perspective from which we can view the latent human need to confabulate that is simultaneously humbling and ennobling, and one that need not resort to magical thinking. Human beings are composed of matter and energy, we are not merely embedded within cosmology, we are ourselves components of cosmological processes and part of the universe-in-motion. The mythic archetypes that so easily delude human beings are as much the product of naturalistic processes as anything else and it is precisely because they are part of the naturalistic process that they have such traction. They are ancient, primordial relics of our animal heritage. Magicians, fairies, monsters and otherworlds seem to lurk in the essential structure of our shared humanity. If they did not exist it would be necessary to invent them.

So when I think of the things I like to write about - the bill of goods – I keep returning to the same things; the nature of the world as imagined by the ignorant, how this crudely imagined representation of things can be described in a consistent way and whether there is any value in consistency, how there is a necessity to reserve some moral judgment with regards to those that people the narrative and even to embrace their immorality as a form of integrity, how everything seems to be extruded by the idiotic machinery of spacetime. For all these things I keep returning to fantasy. It would be interesting to imagine a future world that based a genre upon the delusions contemporary humanity holds, a kind of pseudoscience fiction, complete with messianically-empowered reptoid televangelists and anti-vax sasquatch CIA-insiders flying planes into buildings to foil Illuminati plans to control humanity with chemtrails. Discovering M. John Harrison has assisted me in debunking some of my own delusions: the Laighlands (Lowlands, Lawlands, Meagrish Realm) is not a place (it is actually Doggerland) and exists only as a means to convey ideas and emotional impressions into the brains of other primates. That is plenty.

I leave you with Ruskin, from Seven Lamps of Architecture, 

...the Power of architecture may be said to depend on the quantity (whether measured in space or intenseness) of its shadow; and it seems to me, that the reality of its works, and the use and influence they have in the daily life of men (as opposed to those works of art with which we have nothing to do but in times of rest or of pleasure) require of it that it should express a kind of human sympathy, by a measure of darkness as great as there is in human life: and that as the great poem and great fiction generally affect us most by the majesty of their masses of shade, and cannot take hold upon us if they affect a continuance of lyric sprightliness, but must be serious often, and sometimes melancholy, else they do not express the truth of this wild world of ours; so there must be, in this magnificently human art of architecture, some equivalent expression for the trouble and wrath of life, for its sorrow and its mystery: and this it can only give by depth or diffusion of gloom, by the frown upon its front, and the shadow of its recess.