#it's not his fault the rules and laws a modern reader would have internalized literally do not apply to his universe

[clonecumber]

The fact the Star Wars universe doesn’t actually have an equivalent of the Geneva Conventions or really any sort of actual law of war really fucking shows sometimes.

I rambled a bit so I’m cutting it here.

I mean, it makes sense in-universe. Not even getting into that the last(?) major major conflict the Republic had to deal with was against Sith and that would definitely leave a mark on their approach to warfare, I’d imagine, the Republic around the time of the prequels and a bit before that period probably wouldn’t really see the need for international (you know what I mean) laws mandating conduct in warfare. War up until the Clone Wars was sort of treated as...well, very “what happens in your house stays in your house” and you could be as awful as you wanted to each other on your own planet provided it didn’t go spilling out on the street to bother the neighbors.

Inter-planetary conflict just didn’t happen in the form of traditional (”traditional”) warfare (when it did happen, it seems like it was almost all economic volleys, targeted mercenary jobs, and the occasional angry insurgent group that made its way off-planet), and the Jedi were really the only ones who cared to go wandering around and sticking their noses in to single-planet problems. There’s no way in hell the Senate was going to regulate warfare. “Why is your mess my problem,” was probably their thinking.

(Palpatine did his job way too well.)

Which means we roll into the Clone Wars with zero Republic-wide systems in place to mitigate the damage what-so-fucking-ever. The Separatists sure as hell aren’t going to open “let’s not be total fucking animals about this” talks that might lead to a universe-equivalent of at least the Geneva Conventions, after all. They have droids. They don’t care. The ones who would have to open those talks would be the Republic, which they maybe might have if they’d had to draft their own citizens into the shiny new GAR beyond some officers and a bit of the supporting staff, but.

I don’t even think I need to continue that. We all know not a single person in the Senate is required to give a single flying fuck about the clone troopers, which of course means they don’t, and they’ve already been conditioned to think of civilian casualties as someone else’s problem, which means The Clone Wars is a literal fucking free-for-all. 

You literally can’t commit a war crime because the laws defining a war crime don’t exist.

this just in: star wars is a literal dystopian hellscape i fucking

[beloved-judged]

The inexpressible

This is going to be a bit... fragmented.

I should say, up front, that one of my degrees is an MFA--poetry and creative non-fiction. I have a license to poet, to be abstract and playful with language, and training in recognizing the internal structure of meaning as it is presented in language use.

I also took an absolute ass load of rhetoric courses, eventually taking Greek coursework (in addition to the mandatory Latin) in order to read the texts left us by various rhetors and their historians side-by-side with their translations.

I do language. It’s a different brain than I use on the daily in programming (and in fact, they’re oppositional for some subsets of use), but I’ve proved to the satisfaction of an academic committee that I can language just fine, even convincingly.

A confluence of events today: my papa releasing a blizzard of podcasts in the last two days, re-reading Snow Crash, and a bunch of random events have lead me to spend the last few days contemplating language.

It’s going to be here because it applies to the things my papa has been talking about.

When you choose to speak, take for granted you have already lost a lot of meaning--to render a situation into language is to make decisions about what it is, how it is, and how others may understand it, all of which are bound to your individual understanding (as well as whatever social rules, ideas, etc you have absorbed, because we’re not islands.) To make those decisions is to decide what is important and relevant, what others may understand, and what you want others to understand.

And to make those decisions is to decide not just what’s included, but what is omitted. This starts the second words come into play and before it, in the language we are inculcated with.

The latest podcast my papa released is a parable about one of the founding fathers of Sufism, which I will spoil and say the moral of the story is that the presence of someone who has achieved enlightenment is just as important as any attention they might give you (and in some cases, to not give attention at all, so as not to feed the ego.)

The presence, without language--to exist within eyesight and hearing, without direct interaction.

In Snow Crash, the author plays with an old, old dichotomy: religions of the book (that is, legalistic religions which base their principles on a written text which is required to take a form which does not permit as much individual interpretation) versus cultic religions, in which enlightenment is achieved through individual experience and is not subject to being ruled or shaped by the contents of a text.

Christianity is, at best, a mixed bag by that criteria, but tends toward a religion of the book rather than a cultic religion--as it is practiced in many places, it has elements of personal enlightenment, but is checked (at least in theory) against the text of the Bible, which is considered the authority on what it is and means to be a Christian. Again, in theory. This may not be true of individual Christian groups, churches, or Christians and it does not matter if it is true. Christianity bases itself on the Bible as a general rule.

A religion of a central text, against which all things are (supposed to be) checked.

One of the most haunting reads in my rhetorical studies was The Phadreus--a dialog on the nature of rhetoric (the art of persuasion). In the book, which is arranged as a long dialog, Socrates is talking to Phadreus about the nature of language, persuasion, and what makes a good versus a bad rhetor. There is a whole section where he talks about the relationship between writing and speech in rhetoric, remarking that he does not trust writing to do what it is supposed to do (to serve as an aid to memory, to make the idea immortal). He remarks that to read and write a thing is inadequate to produce experts, and that expertise requires something more in terms of experience and inspiration.

Or to put it a slightly different way: you might be able to write down instructions on how to do a complex thing, but the instructions by themselves are not going to make someone capable of performing the task well.

And, as he remarked, all too often when we commit something to writing, we promptly cease to make the effort to remember it--remembering becomes a problem of the medium we write in.

We wrote it down, now it’s the paper’s job to remember it.

This can, as he points out in The Phadreus and elsewhere in the texts produced by Plato during that period, lead to the state where people can take their speech--that is, the things produced from their mouth--and treat it as if it does not belong to them, as if, because they are quoting, they no longer ‘own’ the words they speak, and thus are not bound to the consequence of them.

You can see an awful lot of this in white, academic, and main cultures: if I’m quoting someone else, it’s not my fault. If I am sufficiently careful to quote, I can get away with saying all kinds of things and have a reasonable expectation that I won’t be held accountable for it.

In primarily oral cultures, as a quick side note and by contrast, what you say (the promises you make) is a profound reflection of you as a person, and you will be held accountable for it. Everything that comes out of your mouth, you own, and there is no shield of ‘just quoting’ or ‘just saying’ to save you from suffering the consequences of your speech.

Magic, where it concerns speech, often appears to me to inherit from that understanding of the word. That which issues out of your mouth is a spike, affixing you to consequence, that you cannot wriggle out of.

Trusting in the written word also, as Socrates points out, tends to lead to the state where the writer thinks they have been clear, and the reader thinks they have understood, but neither are right: the written word does not lend itself to clarity, but to deceptive equivocation. The appearance of clarity, but only if both parties do not think deeply or ask much of the interaction, and part of the inability of the book to produce experts has to do with the absence of expertise and inspiration to enforce clarity.

I find that is much on my mind--where we find clarity. I have about twenty years of training in academia, in finding clarity in books. I would be hard-pressed to count how many books I’ve read, even by genre. It is where my mind is ... comfortable. A confluence of training and natural inclinations.

The experts with whom I might study to understand rhetoric, say, are dead and dust in the ground, in some cases for thousands of years. They cannot be present with me, and while there are plenty of modern scholars with whom I might study, I am unlikely to ever have the chance to do so.

There is something tied to presence, something which governs learning. In Snow Crash, which is very much propaganda for literate societies, the idea that there is a pre-verbal experience of understanding or something that defies the ability to be verbalized within literature structures, is a virus analogous to herpes: something that represents an invader of the ordered, literate body, which subverts it and irreparably harms the health of the body and the mind.

Without the book to govern thought, all is madness, and those who are trained in specific kinds of literacy (in the case of Snow Crash, technical literacy) are susceptible to a madness which burns out their ability to think and their identity, their ability to appear rational to the literate society around them. They become as individualized as an insect, which is to say that they have no individual identity.

That is where I am going--to that non-verbal place. It’s a thought that fills me with anxiety, but also with relief. I cannot touch rationality but to notice irrationality in it, the vital absences which compose the underpinning of rationality, both in language and in concept.

Language is a slippery bastard.

Vodou is a cult, by the definition of the majority religion (Christianity), and by definition in general, in that it has no centralized authority (no pope), no central dogma (a Bible, say), and relies on individual experience with the divine (in possession, inspiration, or through witnessing a possession.) It is also a community-driven religion: mutual support, mutual aid, mutual living. It has authority figures (the priests), but the authority structure is very localized. A priest is the priest for his or her temple, not for every vodouizant everywhere. Authority is recognized, but not universal.

Atop that, it is also very much an oral culture: you are absolutely responsible for your words.

In my experiences with possession so far, both partial (someone else was using my body and I could witness but not interfere) and complete (black out), it has been a place where all my literacy, all my rationality (and I used to teach logic), all the things I would call my identity, were pointless. Either gently but firmly pushed aside, or gone altogether with the rest of me. And I have never, in my experience of being partially possessed, spoken.

Moved? Sure. Expressed something? Yes. Performed feats? Yep.

Fully possessed, however, I’m told my body has done a lot of speaking.

But the literate qualities of myself, the parts writing this entry, were either absent or entirely beside the point. It is not an easy thing to flirt with the destruction of these parts of myself. It’s deeply, deeply discomforting to recognize that where I am going, I am not. Where I am going, all that I am now will be beside the point.

Existential panic, I think, is about right.

What am I, without language? What remains in those spaces?

I cannot enjoy the wine of oblivion without reaping it--I cannot enter the waters of the void in meditation and not expect to have to perform the work necessary to come back and swim it.

What words, what shapes, what law is written on me in such places?

I hope the lwa will forgive me for being afraid.

The more I see of what I will be losing, the more... frightening the cost becomes. The fear of becoming a babbling adept, the fear of losing my ability to appear rational in rational society, the loss of those years building expertise.

The loss of myself, those endlessly reflecting mirrors of structure so painstakingly cultivated, and I know my papa would say “no, not yourself. What you think you are” but it is not entirely comforting.

And if I lose this, this speaking self writing these words...

And if I lose...

I struggle at this price. Does it seem dramatic? Only because this is the bastion I have spent my life defending against the attacks of family, colleagues, and a world determined to tell me that women cannot be rational.

I have been beaten for knowledge. Repeatedly. For daring to ask questions. I have been forcibly excised from academia, because I could not find enough support to defend myself against harassment. I have given up relationships and exposed myself to constant, crippling criticism and the many cruelties of people who found my presence intolerable. I have given up meals, a bed under my head, clothes, love, children, and the acquisition of wealth to know. There has been no easy path to knowledge for me, no family poised to encourage and protect, no social matrix to provide support.

This is the next price I will have to pay. Just a pound of flesh from nearest my heart.

What will be left of me, this babbling self ironic in the drive to cage in language what ultimately dissolves it?

I do not know if I can pay it. I can only... make myself try because I will keep my word.

And because anything else will never be enough.

My love, my love, the crown of my soul, papa, patron, master--you scare me.