#the unreachable knife is a really interesting choice like what's the context

[paradife-loft]

the other day, I was discussing with @the-mirador about how there was one section in The Golden Compass that I had a lot of thoughts & feelings about during rereading, and wanted to get to at further length than I could really do with just a phone keyboard. having a feeling this would a) be really goddamn long and b) be of interest to other people as well, I decided to just write a public post! so - slightly belatedly, here’s James Rants About The Dialogue Between Lee Scoresby and Serafina Pekkala.

(disclaimer: while I have vague recollections of the subsequent two books in the trilogy, emphasis here on the word vague. some of what I’m saying here may be addressed or dealt with by material from Subtle Knife or Amber Spyglass that I don’t remember right now. this is entirely a “reactions to TGC without knowledge of what comes next” post.)

this dialogue starts out with Lee asking Serafina whether it’s likely the people in his balloon are going to be attacked further if they continue on their current course of action, because going into outright war wasn’t the expedition he signed up and was paid for, and specifically armed conflict would likely do damage to his balloon - his means of making a living, which he’d have to repair on his own dime without the usual reimbursement of wartime pay.

Serafina, to answer this, starts talking about how well, actually everybody is already engaged in war whether they know it or not; she also a bit later explains how choices in the way Lee talks about mean less to witches because they live for hundreds of years and “know that every opportunity will come again”. additionally, contrasting with Lee’s concern with whether he’s charged enough for his transport contracts to make up his expenses, she talks about how witches “have different needs” from humans and so aren’t concerned with profit and value, having “no means of exchange apart from mutual aid” - because all they need to do to fly is take a branch from an abundantly present tree (instead of making all manner of costly repairs to a piece of technology), and they have no need for warm clothing because they don’t feel the cold.

and honestly? this pisses me right the fuck off. I don’t even necessarily disagree with the larger points Serafina is making about how everyone is bound up in the events happening in their time and can’t just push away their involvement because oh I didn’t choose to get into a war - no, you didn’t, but it’s what’s happening and burying your head in the sand in response is going to have consequences just as actively participating would. but g-d do I find it desperately obnoxious when a person or group who operates on a different scale of concern from day-to-day people (or their relevant contextual stand-in), voices this “wise”, implicitly narratively valorised point of view that the regular person’s mundane, venal concerns like how to make a living, whether they’re being given enough information to go into a situation with some amount of agency, whether they’re being taken advantage of and then hung out to dry or not, are shortsighted and petty and immaterial in the face of Destiny TM.

I mean maybe this is just that I’m an adult now who pays fucking rent and not a kid going starry-eyed at the invocation of the concept of witches, but boy did reading Lee Scoresby’s perspective here give me a massive “ahahaha well I guess I sure am American, aren’t I” sense of fuckor.

(but also? big-picture concerns and day-to-day livability concerns aren’t mutually exclusive. it’s come up repeatedly in pieces of Torah and Talmud study groups I’ve attended, places where Jewish law and discussion express ethical living, holiness, in the minutiae of legal arguments over water rights, how to properly materially compensate a person for the loss of a resource they use to live! doing right by others is a matter of learning about these kinds of details, because they have dramatic impacts on the quality of life of people all around you. these things are what make a society good to live in.)

second point that pisses me off: the idea of mutual aid arising only from beings of a different nature from humans entirely, who don’t need to deal with such pesky things as limited time and resource scarcity and bodies subject to the elements, of course not~ like fuck. give me the mutual aid that is a struggle. give me the mutual aid of people who understand the difficulty and the costs and care, desperately, how they can figure out the best way to equitably distribute limited time and resources to the people who need them, in frail and fragile and limited mortal bodies. I don’t want this kind of utopianism in the original sense of the word, where you need to escape the nature of humans’ present conditions of existence to get to an otherwise nonexistent place. Mutual Aid in the initial Kropotkin discussion is about a strategy of cooperation in and amongst the natural world, a method of survival among humans and other animals that are still entirely subject to these weaknesses that witches are not. don’t make it into a way of living that’s wise and superior and unreachable.

....oh, and speaking of human nature, another part that made me want to scream a lot, in the subsequent conversation between Serafina and Lyra: Serafina talks about how there was a time when she would have traded her existence as a witch to be with Farder Coram as a human wife, though it’s impossible because “you cannot change what you are, only what you do”. or: a reinforcement of the narrative’s turning up its nose at Iofur Raknison who wishes to interact with humans on human terms, and forsakes “innate bear-ness” for a ~sad pale mockery of humanness that leaves him and his following less than either proper human or bear. because that’s the damn thing: if you can’t change your nature, and you can either embrace your nature or refuse it and become less than, then no, you don’t actually have the opportunity to change what you do! it’s either “be what you’re supposed to or else you’ll just suck I guess”. (Lee Scoresby frames things in terms of free will which I don’t agree with because I’m a dang materialist bastard, but motherfuck am I ragefully on his side here on the topic of “let people have an actual choice!”)

like, this is my real 100% ride-or-die position on this: fuck “whatever your fundamental nature is”. do mad science! learn how to take a bear and turn him into a human if that’s what he wants! (don’t fucking set up a disgusting hierarchy of “humans are the best and any other sentients will at best be tolerated with tittering amused snobbery while we manipulate them for our own gain“ so that the desire to become a human is fundamentally a coerced one; don’t set up a dang child-mutilation compound out in the tundra to avoid getting slapped on the wrist by your IRB. but y’know, besides that shit.) if a person wants to change something about who or what they are - setting aside discussions of societal coercion that don’t present each option as equally viable because that’s a whole big and important thing but it’s not the point I’m making here - then in abstraction before we get to questions about the repercussions in other parts of We Live In A Society, it is a good thing to look for a way to help them do it. I’m a transhumanist. fuck nature, fuck destiny, fuck limits.

so, I don’t know. perhaps you can make the case that nobody here is an unbiased narrator supported by the story itself; these are just perspectives about what is right that are shaped invariably by the fact that in this universe for the time being, destiny and fate and immutable natures do exist, and basically every culture most of the characters come from has instilled into them, you’ve just gotta make your peace with that. I don’t think I agree with that argument, which is a large part of why these parts of the story make me as angry as they do; there doesn’t seem to be thusfar any indication that fighting against the determinism of “your nature” is particularly admirable. (I say this even in the context of Lord Asriel’s last speech to Mrs. Coulter, honestly, because in this metaphysical reality that he accepts where Adam and Eve and original sin are real things, the idea of humans free from sin doesn’t seem impossible by nature, only by history and the tyranny of decisions made by people and institutions.)

anyway, I think that’s about it for now. so in conclusion, fuck this noise, fuck that noise, this metaphysical-narrative stance makes me angry, and good night! :D