Myths of the single word
August 21st 2006 23:30
Borges tells the story of the poet and the emperor. The emperor asks for a commemoration. The poet complies. And after long labour, the poet speaks to the emperor a single word that contains the palace and all the lands beyond. The emperor orders the poet executed, for his empire has been taken from him.
In The Neverending Story and in the Bible all things start with a word. And perhaps (so has it sometimes been suggested) all things end with one: the White Witch of Narnia in The Magician's Nephew destroys with the Deplorable Word; and the warlock of the forgettable 1991 movie wants to unmake with the true name of God.
Such stories have at least these two elements:
On the one hand, there is the power of words. After all, magic is all about manipulating physical forces with written and spoken language ("Open sesame"). In folklore, superstition, one should avoid the mere expression of an evil thought ("Touch wood"), and there are always words, rhymes, names to yield mastery over a supernatural adversary. In Jewish myth, one brings the golem to life by inscribing emet, "truth", on its forehead, and kills it by deleting the first letter, leaving met, "death". In Shinto, Motoori Norinaga thought that words have a spiritual side (kotodama), and that the sounds of the original language were important if one wanted connection with ancient Japan. In Buddhism, the Bhagavadgita and the Upanishads wax on and on about the syllable "Om".
On the other hand, there is the dramatic reduction to tiny objects. One might think of "Men in Black" -- the galaxy in a diamond.
Such things haunt the imagination. The cultural mind is lazy. We dream of shortcuts, gems of knowledge, single esoteric truths. E=MC2. In Gibson's "Hinterlands", we send astronauts into some hell dimension, and they come back disfigured, deranged, suicidal, but they bear with them little scraps -- the cure for cancer engraved on a ring. And so we keep sending them.
In The Neverending Story and in the Bible all things start with a word. And perhaps (so has it sometimes been suggested) all things end with one: the White Witch of Narnia in The Magician's Nephew destroys with the Deplorable Word; and the warlock of the forgettable 1991 movie wants to unmake with the true name of God.
Such stories have at least these two elements:
On the one hand, there is the power of words. After all, magic is all about manipulating physical forces with written and spoken language ("Open sesame"). In folklore, superstition, one should avoid the mere expression of an evil thought ("Touch wood"), and there are always words, rhymes, names to yield mastery over a supernatural adversary. In Jewish myth, one brings the golem to life by inscribing emet, "truth", on its forehead, and kills it by deleting the first letter, leaving met, "death". In Shinto, Motoori Norinaga thought that words have a spiritual side (kotodama), and that the sounds of the original language were important if one wanted connection with ancient Japan. In Buddhism, the Bhagavadgita and the Upanishads wax on and on about the syllable "Om".
On the other hand, there is the dramatic reduction to tiny objects. One might think of "Men in Black" -- the galaxy in a diamond.
Such things haunt the imagination. The cultural mind is lazy. We dream of shortcuts, gems of knowledge, single esoteric truths. E=MC2. In Gibson's "Hinterlands", we send astronauts into some hell dimension, and they come back disfigured, deranged, suicidal, but they bear with them little scraps -- the cure for cancer engraved on a ring. And so we keep sending them.
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Comment by jon
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I have never seen Hinterlands -- is it worth watching?
Comment by Adrian
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"Hinterlands" is a short story in William Gibson's "Burning chrome" collection. The collection as a whole is very worth reading. Among other things, it contains the famous "Johnny Mnemonic" tale that is a precursor to Neuromancer.
"Hinterlands" in particular, though, might be a touch unsatisfying -- seems to be more a matter of setting up a scenario than constructing beginning, middle, end.
Comment by Cibbuano
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great post, adrian!
can you send me a message with your email address in it, please? You can send a message from 'My Orble'...
Comment by Adrian
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Have tried to write to you through the Orble community messages thing. Two messages show up in my sent messages folder, but let me know if they don't get through.
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