Foreigner, C.J. Cherryh. rating = 4

(what is she going on about?)

ok. Foreigner by C.J.Cherryh. I keep on about it, don't I? I think there must be something bubbling around in my subconscious that her work affects directly and almost, just almost brings to the surface. one day I'll realize what it is. hopefully. until then, another post on Foreigner.

but this is because I just read it, again, and I've never done a little review on it so I thought I'd jot one down. I'm going through the series as #9 is due out in February.

and yes I was recently interrupted in this re-read as the plumbing and a certain stomach virus conspired to dissolve the work in a baleful wash of clorox and diarrhea. and yes I'm still upset about it. the book I ordered and received as a replacement is just that, a replacement. it doesn't automatically open up to the best parts and I've only read it (part of it at that, as I didn't start over) once, instead of 43,000 times. but it is not fair to take out my frustrations on a new book, when it is just doing the best it can.

that reminds me of Tano and Algini, and that reminds me that the word of the book is Glum. ;)

Glum: it's not just for Algini anymore.

C.J.Cherryh seems to find a favorite word as she's writing a novel, and you know what it is because it shows up way way too often in the work to be a random thing. in Foreigner, the word is glum. (more recently it was fugue, but I'm sure we'll get to that book soon enough.) the new servants Tano and Algini are glum, Bren is glum, Jago is glum, the atmosphere is glum. amazingly though I myself was not glum while reading this, just awfully cold, as Cherryh has this absolutely horrid habit of running her heroes through the gamut and invariably there are sequences of them being all kinds of cold. cold air, cold wind, cold rain, and never any proper blankets or protective tents etc. and I hate being cold.

ah but I digress. kinda. what I wanted to point out was Cherryh's fabulous world-building and characterization skills evident in Foreigner. the reader is instanly submerged in a tale with a setting so real you can reach out and touch it. the characters are people, faulted and real, no hero/villain combinations, esp. and the atevi? I'm sure they exist somewhere out there and maybe she's even been to see them lol. their language, their history, their culture and traditions are every bit as real my own. and Bren Cameron? jeez the boy is way too much like me. I think maybe he is me sometimes but then he does some fool thing different than how I do my fool things...

you know the saying about God and Tolstoy being two bears in the same cave? well who do you think is telling the story about the cave? C.J. Cherryh of course!

I give it Foreigner a 4.

for one thing, read the back cover, and then skip to book 2. (book 2 of Foreigner, not the second book in the series but a division within the novel itself.) you don't need to read the history of the Phoenix journey in that much minute detail, you really don't. later on, you might want to go back and fill yourself in on the details, but I'm not sure it's the best way to start the series. if you really want to know, you could go straight to book 3, which is "current time"--- straight to the misadventures of Bren Cameron as it were.

for another thing, I always get hungry for eggs when I read this series! that and stews. Bren and co are always having the most delicious breakfasts, and spiced game stews, and even the fish sandwiches give me a craving. it's just like in The Never Ending Story ;) Bren's waking up and I have to make scrambled eggs at least twice.

now... Mr. Bren. who is supposed to be the closest thing to an expert on the atevi that the humans have (not saying much, as the other humans are even more clueless than he is). and yet... how is it that the paidhi can have such a real almost-fear of the assassin guild and its practices, and at the same time understand so little? the man (at this point in the books) is sure that Jago is lollygagging around drinking soda while he attends a council meeting, and that Banichi has left him with Jago to go meet a mysterious lover. hello, Bren. they are high-ranking guild assassins in the middle of (or supposedly in the middle of) an investigation into the safety of the very Bujavid--- they have other things to do! one minute he's asking them if they've found the person who attempted to assassinate him, the next he thinks they're just changing his routine to inconvenience him because they think it's funny.

if that's the best humanity can do, then, what a poor, poor picture.

oh, and I wanted to talk about Bren's anger. if you remember many moons ago I posted about Brothers of Earth, a very early work of Cherryh's, and part of what I said was that the human character was always angry and reacting angrily to everything, and I could never figure out why. well, Bren is quite angry in this book as well (as well as being glum) and so I read this time around with the aim in mind to try and figure out why these human male heroes are always angry.

one is angry when one perceives (or judges) that one has been wronged. one has been insulted, hurt, abused. one has had something taken away that is rightfully theirs. one has been accused of something one would never do. etc. but the basic idea is that one has been wronged.

so to think that one is angry all the livelong day means that one must have taken quite a lot of things/events as personal insults.

how freakin selfish are you, Mr. Bren Cameron? hmmm? the world does not revolve around you. there are more important things going on that do not involve you even though they might indirectly and unavoidably affect you. it simply can't be helped. why take it all personally?

but that is not quite fair to him. there are other situations in which one might be angry... like when one is depressed. I have learned, to my surprise and chagrin, that sometimes when one is depressed, one expresses it as anger, without sometimes even being aware of this.

indeed, often times we are not consciously aware of why we feel certain emotions, unless we stop and think about it. surely if anyone analyzes his own thought processes, it is Bren Cameron! but one must be aware of things in order to analyze them. so depression can be lurking underneath the anger, and one might not realize it at first, and one might even think one has another good reason to be angry, which is only a front when examined.

also sometimes we make ourselves angry, on purpose, whether knowingly or unknowingly, as a way of screwing up our courage to do something very difficult or scary. we might have a habit of doing this without even realizing it.

and then of course anger can be promoted (or otherwise) by our culture. New York City seems to promote an anger culture; it is okay to be quick to anger there, in fact it is rather expected that people will be quick to anger with you and that you will be quick to anger with other people. this is a generalization of course, as all discussions of culture are, because the extent to which a culture influences its people varies from individual to individual. but you know there is a marked difference between New York City and the countries of the Mediterranean, where people are more laid back and will not take offense so easily, and indeed seem to push each other much more sometimes in a manner of friendly interaction. there, you are not expected to take offense so easily, and you do not expect people to take offense so easily at what you do/say.

I daresay Bren is from an anger culture. an over-generalization, to be sure, but consider: his people are irretrievably lost, betrayed and abandoned by the only starship and human contact to which they had any hope, stranded on a world with very reluctant natives who are quickly getting to the point where they not only don't want them around but don't need them around either... and this after a promising beginning! so, I'd say if Bren's people (on Mospheira) were at all bright, they'd be scared witless. and it's much to draining to be scared witless all the time. just five minutes of that is quite an ordeal; one simply has to find another way to cope with long-term (over 200 years!) fear. so they either lull themselves into denial (a very popular tactic among any human population) or they screw up their courage by getting angry.

that's why I'd say it's perfectly reasonable to think Bren's culture (and the ship culture they came from) could very well be an anger culture... and I think that supposition has a good deal of supporting evidence throughout the series, even if it mostly deals with Mospheira only during crisis when people would normally get angry more easily anyway. just the fact that there are so many Mospheirans who are offended by anything atevi clues us in a little bit here.

and, goodness, let us not forget that poor Bren is in pain throughout most of the story, including oftentimes a very personal kind of pain, and that pain makes one very short-tempered. yes, that is perfectly understandable indeed...

ok but back to the book...

p 59:

He had been scared of the events last night. Now he was mad, furiously angry with the disruption in his life, his quarters, his freedom to come and go in the city....

(geez mia that's pretty obvious and yet you didn't get it until this re-read. he was scared but now he's twisted it into anger to have the courage to deal with the situation. being the victim of an assassination attempt might do that to you!)

p 154:

Well, atevi had tried to bluff him before---including Tabini. Atevi in the court had set up traps to destroy his dignity, and with it his credibility. So he knew the game. He summoned up the mild anger and the amusement it deserved, walked up with his heart in his throat....

(so it's even habitual with Bren, just he's never used it to such a degree before, and that's because he's never met with such unfortunate circumstances. at this point he might not realize he's doing it so often.)

is it more though?

p 180:

He'd fired a gun, he'd learned he would shoot to kill,for fear, for--- he was discovering--- for a terrible, terrible anger he had, an anger that was still shaking him--- an anger he hadn't known he had, didn't know where it had started, or what it wanted to do, or whether it was directed at himself, or atevi, or any specific situation.

p 268:

And he discovered so much bitter, secret anger in him--- so much rage he shook with it, while Nokhada's saner, more reasoned strides carried him up and up among the protecting rocks. ... He hated the pressures at home on Mospheira, the job-generated pressures and most of all the emotional, human ones. At the moment he hated atevi, at least in the abstract, he hated their passionless violence and the lies and the endless, schizophrenic analysis he had to do, among them, of every conclusion, every emotion, every feeling he owned, just to decide whether it came of human hard-wiring or logical processing.
And most of all he hated hurting for people he didn't hurt back.

perhaps now you can see why (esp considering I've revisited the story so many times) I have my questions about it. something to think about. or maybe it's obvious to everyone else and I only get it through dissection. eventually.

here is one passage I want to address, a separate topic, p 258:

they'd made him think he was going to die, and in such a moment, dammit, he'd have thought he'd think of Barb, he'd have thought he'd think of his mother or Toby or someone human, but he hadn't. They'd made him stand face-to-face with that disturbing, personal moment of truth, and he hadn't discovered any noble sentiments or even human reactions. The high snows and the sky was all he'd been able to see, being alone was all he could imagine--- just the snow, just the sky and the cold, up where he went to have his solitude from work and his own family's clamoring demands for his time, that was the truth they'd pushed him to, no love, no humanity---

whoah whoah Nand'Bren. I take exception to that. humanity is not just about other humans! ok maybe other people who are not as aspy as I am might automatically think of their human loved ones, or maybe not. but I still hold that it is perfectly reasonable and appropriate to think of the OTHER things you love too. he loves the land he spent his youth in; what's to fault in that? that's human too. that is also love, that is very much also love. and yes I think it's perfectly natural to think (in such a moment) of the loves that you have that are your anchors to this life, your solid, unwavering connections to reality, your stable lines so to speak--- instead of the connections you have to other people who use them primarily as a hand-holds for tug-of-war on your time and your life and your soul. also it's reassuring to think that the mountains and the snow etc will be there after you're gone, and will be there for years and eons maybe, carrying on, and somebody maybe can come in the future and say, I'm standing where Bren Cameron stood. whereas if you think of your mother or brother, etc, you likely will think of how your death will grieve them and of your responsibility towards them which you can't fulfill after you're dead.

so Bren's reaction is perfectly normal in my view. he's just been taught to question so much about his thinking that if it isn't about humans then he doesn't see it as a human reaction. and that just strikes a nerve with me so I post on my blog about it.

anyway, hey-ho, here's a quote (one of many in this book & series) that reminds me of me, p 213:

"What sort becomes paidhi?" she asked him, before he could take a second step.
Good question, he thought. Solid hit. He had to think about it, and didn't find the answer he'd used to have.. couldn't even locate the boy who'd started down that track, couldn't believe in him, even marginally.
"A fool, probably."
"One doubts, nadi-ji. Is that a requirement?"
"I think so."

ps, a fave quote is on p147. or want to understand man'chi? --- p 255 and 306.

and pss I give it a 4.

Foreigner Series, in order

for your reference:

Foreigner
Invader
Inheritor
---
Precursor
Defender
Explorer
---
Destroyer
Pretender
Deliverer

I think what I like so much about the Foreigner series, besides the atevi in general and certain atevi in particular, is that the plots and themes and characters of those books reveal intelligent, thorough ideas and nascent synergy of ideas on so many levels (and, indeed, on many different subjects, all of which I find personally intriguing). of course, the cultural and linguistic themes are obvious, as well as personality/psychology uncovered in the soul-searching. those are present in many of Cherry's works. the paidhi theme and the assassin's guild theme are not new to Foreigner either, but they take some slightly different approaches here. so, what I mean to say, is that it's not always the story itself, but the issues that the story addresses.

C.J. Cherryh's Fiction

--------------------------

C.J. Cherryh's Fiction
Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by Burton Raffel



Consider, first, a novel about a thirty-seven-year-old ship's crew-woman, thrown up on the beach by an economic squeeze, unemployed and unemployable because unwilling to change a way of life that simply does not exist on shore. She has been left in a dying port, where ships seldom dock and those that do cannot offer her employment. Without alternatives or resources, she contemplates starvation (or even suicide). She is becoming physically shrunken; her clothing is worn, almost tattered. "She smelled strongly of soap, of restroom disinfectant soap, a scent [one] had to think awhile to place."

A local resident, struck by her persistence and pride, gives her what work he can, illegally; a sex-driven barkeep gives her a place to sleep (with him, of course) and a bit of food. The barkeep turns sadistic; trained in violence as well as ship-board mechanics, she kills him. Unexpectedly, a disguised quasi-military ship arrives, and she talks her way into a rock-bottom berth. But before she can leave, the dead man is found, she is arrested--and then freed when the ship uses its military status and authority to claim her. Safely on board, still half dazed, "she avoided looking at people, especially looking them in the eye or starting up a conversation, just stared blankly at the main-deck [which she has been ordered to clean] and all those possible footprints people were making walking back and forth--footprints had occupied her mind all day, still occupied it, in her condition--and she mentally numbed out, tasting the food and the tea down to its molecules, it was so good, and finding her hands so sore [that] holding a fork hurt."

Written throughout in consistently clear, probing prose, perfectly suited to both characters and subject matter, C.J. Cherryh's Rimrunners (1989) is obviously a tale of adventure. Less obviously, it is also a close, intense psychological study and a keen exposition, in strongly presented, deeply imagined detail, of complex interrelationships between and among individual and social forces, in a time and place not our own. In pure stylistic terms, some of B. J. Traven's work comes to mind; so too does other determinedly nonLiterary literary fiction. Cherryh writes: "... they were a little gone, having a damn good time, but gone, and NG [short for `no good'] was gone too, out-there, deep-spaced and having trouble breathing."

Plainly, her prose has strong rhythms of its own--but how different is this, qualitatively, from, say: "Helene was not a teetotaler by any means. In fact, Ed encouraged her to drink. She was more fun when she drank. But she was liable to get drunk tonight, because it was Christmas, and Ed didn't want her to become reckless with the spirit of giving." That comes from John O`Hara's Appointment in Samarra (1934), which Alfred Kazin called "the best of the `hard-boiled' novels ... [and] a very serious book indeed" (On Native Grounds, 388). Nor would there be any difficulty setting out stylistically related passages from other American writers, notably the original hard-boiler himself, Ernest Hemingway.

The "beach" in Rimrunners is literally a space station; the "ships" are space-going. The fiction is science fiction. But genre labels become irrelevant, at such fully realized and masterful levels. The Lord of the Rings is high-quality fiction, period. It is not simply or primarily fairy-tale or fantasy fiction. Alice in Wonderland is high-quality fiction, not a children's book. Both are unassailably (and enduringly) literature. And so too are the adventure tales (though we tend for obvious reasons not to think of them as adventure tales) of Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth, Robert Louis Stevenson and Herman Melville--and those of C. J. Cherryh.

Like most genuinely literary (not Literary) writers, Cherryh is not limited, either stylistically or in subject matter or approach. She employs "hard-boiled" prose when the particular book or approach seems to her to require it; from time to time, unpredictably and driven only by authorial impulses, she chooses to write of proletarian, feminine, or epic, or heroic, or genetically alien characters and themes, for, as she quite typically says, different subjects and approaches "stretch different muscles" (Amazon.com interview):

QUOTE

It was from the air that the rawness of the land showed most: vast tracts where humanity had as yet made no difference, deserts unclaimed, stark as moons, scrag and woolwood thickets unexplored except by orbiting radar. Ariana Emory gazed down at it from the window. She kept to the passenger compartment now. Her eyesight, she had to admit it, was no longer sharp enough, her reflexes no longer fast enough for the jet. She could go up front, bump the pilot out of the chair and take the controls: it was her plane, her pilot, and a wide sky. Sometimes she did. But it was not the same. Only the land was, still most of the land was. And when she looked out the window, it might have been a century ago ...

Thus begins the first chapter of Cyteen (1988), a massive, intricate, wise, and compelling novel (first published as a trilogy) to which I will return. I want to do no more, at this point, than simply note Cyteen's substantive as well as its quite apparent stylistic expansiveness. Indeed, Cyteen has been called Cherryh's masterpiece, and though that seems to me a valid judgment, the book's brilliance, its intensity, its depth, are I think very closely matched many times over in her work.

QUOTE

There was a division in the world, marked by a causeway of white rock. On the one side, and at the lower end, lay the regul of Kesrith--city-folk, slow-moving, long-remembering. The lowland city was entirely theirs: flat, sprawling buildings, a port, commerce with the stars, mining that scarred the earth, a plant that extracted water from the Alkaline Sea. The land had been called the Dus plain before there were regul on [the planet] Kesrith: the mri remembered. For this reason the mri had avoided the plain, in respect of the dusei [beasts of great bulk, sensitivity, and intelligence, bound to the warrior mri]; but the regul had insisted on setting their city there, and the dusei left it.

The second chapter of Kesrith opens with this intricately woven paragraph. So clear and always urgently to the point is Cherryh's writing that (1) every unfamiliar word and concept in this passage has already been more than satisfactorily explained, in the few pages of the short first chapter, and (2) in addition, time- and valuedimensions of great weight and power have been attached to each and every such term. The trilogy has large and pressingly important ecological dimensions--totally and very powerfully integrated into the plot. In Cherryh's work, one intellectual or analytical dimension tends to be no more insisted upon than any other. She has no need to proclaim, to thunder, to hammer at her readers with her ideas. In short, her literary confidence is as high as her literary energy level (she has said that, in full spate, she writes eighteen hours at a stretch); it enables her to operate in taut synch with her material:

QUOTE

He was tall, even of his kind. His high cheekbones bore the seta'al, the triple scars of his caste, blue-stained and indelible; this meant that he was a full-fledged member of the Kel ... Being of the Kel, he went robed from collar to boot-tops in unrelieved black; and black veil and tasseled headcloth, mez and zaidhe, concealed all but his brow and his eyes from the gaze of outsiders when he chose to meet them; and the zaidhe further had a dark transparent visor that could meet the veil when dust blew or red Arain reached its unpleasant zenith. He was a man: his face, like his thoughts, was considered a private identity, one indecent to reveal to strangers. The veils enveloped him as did the robes, a distinguishing mark of the only caste of the [mri] that might deal with outsiders.

The sheer authority of this seems to me all-compelling. And the weight of the conflicts and questions revolved in front of us, always in measured but only slowly apprehended and even more slowly appreciated fashion, is still further enhanced by heavy narrative reliance on dialogue. Cherryh's characters do not "converse," or merely talk: as all fictive masters know, novelistic dialogue at its best and most effective is a kind of embedded plot.

Constantly thus revealed, and then still further revealed in action (as well as in active introspection: Cherryh handles internal rumination as fluently and judiciously as she does that which is actually spoken), the carefully colored personages moving through these densely woven novels are opened to us as significantly, created as fully and as coherently spun into their and our orbits, as the characters who inhabit any fiction I know.

"[The mri] were a beautiful people," thinks a human at the beginning of Shon'jir, looking down at an unconscious, barely living mri warrior, "tall and slim and golden beneath their black robes: golden manes streaked with bronze, delicate, humanoid features, long, slender hands; their ears had a little tuft of pale down at the tips, and their eyes were brilliant amber, with a nictating membrane that protected them from dust and glare. The mri were at once humanlike and disturbingly alien. Such also were their minds, that could grasp outsiders' ways and yet steadfastly refused to compromise with them."

Another human, at the end of Kutath, and at a moment of decisive and intensely dramatic choice affecting both peoples, thinks to herself:

QUOTE

... Fear had killed the worlds between. To use the mri, one had to play the Game, to cast them from the hand and let them go. The belief that it would be different ... this, she cherished, as she believed in humankind. She played the Game.

Accordingly, these are novels that, inevitably, like Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, like A la recherche du temps perdu and Don Quijote, like The Magic Mountain and David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov, have no real ending, at least in the sense of narrow, two-dimensional, cartographic finality.

Cherryh is fiercely prolific. It would be foolish to expect that each and every novel she writes will maintain absolute, soaring levels. ("Even Homer nods," as Horace observed two thousand years ago.) Still, only Hestia, published in 1979 but probably written well before, and Wave Without a Shore (1981--but, again, probably written earlier), offer anything less than the subtle, passionate writing she has been giving us for more than two decades.

Brothers of Earth (1976), which deftly and convincingly explores the effects of new and long-separated environments on groups of human beings, is more than sufficiently memorable. Hunter of Worlds (1977) impressively explores not only multiple-levels of species relationship, but species differences of an extraordinary nature. Cherryh's driven imaginative urgency pushes her, in this novel, into a realm she does not usually deal with, namely, a race which is unquestionably, unalterably, almost unthinkably superior.

Serpent's Reach (1980) focuses powerfully on humans and a fascinatingly imagined ant-like species. Many of the scenes Cherryh here conjures up are profoundly unforgettable. Voyager in Night (1984), perhaps more intellectually than emotionally intense, once again deals with humans and a "species" far beyond human capacities.

But Cuckoo's Egg (1985), which seems to me almost a study for the writing of Cyteen, is as fine and stirring as anything Cherryh has ever done. It is in a way a brilliant tour de force, looking at humans entirely from an alien perspective--beautifully suggested in the book's very first paragraph, describing the alien at issue, as he waits for an infant human to be brought to him for rearing, in a cause no less than the ultimate survival of this aristocratic tutor's race.

QUOTE

He sat in a room, the sand of which was synthetic, and shining with opal tints, fine and light beneath his bare feet. The windows held no cityview, but a continuously rotating panorama of the Khogghut plain: a lie. Traffic noise came through.

This is prose of perfect suppleness, delicately aligned on word-choices of impeccable selection. The character may seem familiar, at the very first: he is sitting, which is completely within our human ken, and he is in a "room." But then the floor is revealed to be "sand," and not natural sand but "synthetic," and not merely synthetic but "shining with opal tints." Clearly, this is not a humanly familiar setting--and though the person being described (whatever his nature) is a house-dweller, he sits with "bare feet." What the windows display is a "continuously rotating panorama." This is pretty readily imaginable, if not precisely common in our world--but "the Khoggut plain"?

And just who is adding the sarcastic aside, labeling the rotating panorama "a lie"? There is "traffic" in the streets; this is obviously a city. But traffic and a city of exactly what sort? The concepts may be familiar, but by this point the reader is aware that the realities, the living, animate details, the sights and smells, the shapes and colors, cannot be ones with which we are acquainted. Cherryh presents us with all of this, and indeed more, in just three sentences, none of which is overlong, and the last of which is exceedingly short. It would be hard for prose to do more, or better, in so compressed a space.

QUOTE

... Fear had killed the worlds between. To use the mri, one had to play the Game, to cast them from the hand and let them go. The belief that it would be different ... this, she cherished, as she believed in humankind. She played the Game.

Accordingly, these are novels that, inevitably, like Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, like A la recherche du temps perdu and Don Quijote, like The Magic Mountain and David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov, have no real ending, at least in the sense of narrow, two-dimensional, cartographic finality.

Cherryh is fiercely prolific. It would be foolish to expect that each and every novel she writes will maintain absolute, soaring levels. ("Even Homer nods," as Horace observed two thousand years ago.) Still, only Hestia, published in 1979 but probably written well before, and Wave Without a Shore (1981--but, again, probably written earlier), offer anything less than the subtle, passionate writing she has been giving us for more than two decades.

Brothers of Earth (1976), which deftly and convincingly explores the effects of new and long-separated environments on groups of human beings, is more than sufficiently memorable. Hunter of Worlds (1977) impressively explores not only multiple-levels of species relationship, but species differences of an extraordinary nature. Cherryh's driven imaginative urgency pushes her, in this novel, into a realm she does not usually deal with, namely, a race which is unquestionably, unalterably, almost unthinkably superior.

Serpent's Reach (1980) focuses powerfully on humans and a fascinatingly imagined ant-like species. Many of the scenes Cherryh here conjures up are profoundly unforgettable. Voyager in Night (1984), perhaps more intellectually than emotionally intense, once again deals with humans and a "species" far beyond human capacities.

But Cuckoo's Egg (1985), which seems to me almost a study for the writing of Cyteen, is as fine and stirring as anything Cherryh has ever done. It is in a way a brilliant tour de force, looking at humans entirely from an alien perspective--beautifully suggested in the book's very first paragraph, describing the alien at issue, as he waits for an infant human to be brought to him for rearing, in a cause no less than the ultimate survival of this aristocratic tutor's race.

QUOTE

He sat in a room, the sand of which was synthetic, and shining with opal tints, fine and light beneath his bare feet. The windows held no cityview, but a continuously rotating panorama of the Khogghut plain: a lie. Traffic noise came through.

This is prose of perfect suppleness, delicately aligned on word-choices of impeccable selection. The character may seem familiar, at the very first: he is sitting, which is completely within our human ken, and he is in a "room." But then the floor is revealed to be "sand," and not natural sand but "synthetic," and not merely synthetic but "shining with opal tints." Clearly, this is not a humanly familiar setting--and though the person being described (whatever his nature) is a house-dweller, he sits with "bare feet." What the windows display is a "continuously rotating panorama." This is pretty readily imaginable, if not precisely common in our world--but "the Khoggut plain"?

And just who is adding the sarcastic aside, labeling the rotating panorama "a lie"? There is "traffic" in the streets; this is obviously a city. But traffic and a city of exactly what sort? The concepts may be familiar, but by this point the reader is aware that the realities, the living, animate details, the sights and smells, the shapes and colors, cannot be ones with which we are acquainted. Cherryh presents us with all of this, and indeed more, in just three sentences, none of which is overlong, and the last of which is exceedingly short. It would be hard for prose to do more, or better, in so compressed a space.

Both leonine qualities and showy love of pomp and dazzle are in fact integral, basic and important aspects of Pyanfar's colorful, idiosyncratic character. It is she, as captain, who creates, complicates, endangers and ultimately redeems The Pride [a resplendent pun] of Chanur. This too is thoroughly in Cherryh's style: every small event is discovered to be linked to larger and larger causes and effects, to perhaps endlessly radiating circles of involvement. Cultures, worlds, and--in the Chanur universe--our human world come to have connections of a profoundly apposite sort. Cherryh is far too dedicated an explorer of other worlds and ways to allow readers merely passive engagement.

Humans, then, are by no means always set either at the center of Cherryh's vision, or off to the side. On the one hand, human beings are unsurprisingly quite like some of the sentient species she has created. Yet they are distinctly unlike others, much as the methane breathers Cherryh has imagined are inevitably unlike any of the oxygen breathers. It is in that context, I think, that it is most helpful to look at Cyteen, a book which cannot be diminished by being considered apart from the nine other novels (to date) which set out what Cherryh envisages as the events and consequences of human space exploration.


The circle-upon-circle of endlessly out-reaching civilizations does not press so visibly or so immediately, in Cyteen. But even in its own far-flung universe, Cyteen (the planet, not the book) is no more the center than, once upon a time, the Earth itself was thought to be. Cyteen is indeed a world, but it is an expropriated world, intrinsically hostile, and only in part terraformed and human-inhabited. Occupation and the partial transformation of a deeply alien environment have occurred relatively recently. And this planet, which in a very real sense can only be conquered step by step and keeps fighting back every moment of every day, is also the setting for a singularly powerful vector in Cherryh's picture of humanity's post-space-explorations, namely, a great functioning laboratory and factory, called Reseune, where ideas are turned into realities, and inanimate matter is turned into fully functioning, indistinguishably human creatures known as azi. (Indistinguishably human--but differently human.)

More: Cyteen the book is built around this ability of Reseune to create human beings, almost without quantitative limits, in whatever mould is wanted, including industrial or military drones as well as men and women of enhanced ability. Most especially--for the purposes of this novel--Reseune's capabilities have, after years of working toward that goal, achieved the more or less exact re-creation of human beings, in the form of perfect genetic, though of course not psycho-social, clones.

One such cloning, though for policy reasons disguised, is Justin Warrick, officially the "son" of Jordan Warrick, who is a Special--humans of so high a caliber that, by statute, they have vast privileges and protections. There are only twelve of them, in all; the most powerful, as well as the most visible and without question the imaginative center of Cyteen, all throughout its three parts, is Ariane Emory--already introduced in the book's first paragraph, which I have quoted earlier. Ari (as she is called) is herself genetically the child of two human parents, rather than a planned gene-set. Her genetic mother and father were both geneticists and, in fact, the founders of Reseune. More than a hundred years old when Ari was "conceived" (in and by the apparatus of Reseune, which provided a sustaining womb and thus became her physical birth place), the parents are long dead. The rejuvenation techniques that so long preserved them, techniques that have been still further perfected, have brought Ari herself to the age of a hundred and twenty, which starts to approach rejuv's outer limits.(*)

Much feared, for good reason, and much hated, also for good reason, Ari is suddenly mysteriously murdered, midway in the trilogy's first volume. The murderer's identity is and remains unknown, though Jordan Warrick is maneuvered into a confession. Falsely? We never know, though he seems likely to have been guilty. But Reseune cannot manage without Ari, and the decision is made to immediately produce a clone, a possibility which Ari had anticipated and for which she has elaborately planned: her instructions, tapes, videos, and the like, are designed to carry the re-creation to full maturity. The birth, rearing, and coming to adulthood of the clone are then stunningly traced across the often breathtaking pages of volumes two and three. Similarities, and differences, between Ari I and Ari II are developed no less profoundly or achingly affecting than the evolving similarities and differences of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, over which readers and critics through the centuries have wondered and exulted.

This is however only the basic, more or less skeletal structure of Cyteen. I will leave for discussion by others such quietly dropped clues as that the expansionist drive of the interstellar Union, shaped and still dominated by Cyteen, was directly and unquestionably a continuation of that "fervor which had led to the establishment of the original thirteen star stations," or that "Cyteen was founded by people seeking independence from colonial policies of the Earth Company" (315). We even hear of "the framers of the [Union] Constitution." (The very word "union" has of course its own reverberations in these contexts; the names of humanity's other two branches, in Cherryh's grand scheme, are "Sol" and "Alliance," which have no such political echoes.) The heart and soul of the book is the flawlessly interwoven stream of meaningful story and high-powered insight, of fascinating character and palpitating event, all of it embedded in and sometimes set against a detailed matrix that can and regularly does flash with the beautifully melded incandescence of intelligence and sensitized experience.

Were all of the complex matters raised in the novel handled, fictively, as mere concepts, abstractions, the work would be a boring tract--intelligent, well-informed, but lifeless. All of the trilogy's issues are fully enacted and completely embedded in the novel's fabric. Here in its entirety is section iii of chapter 3, pages 102-103 of Cyteen, bringing to life the original Ari as she works in her laboratory--and as we very soon thereafter find out, these are almost the very last moments of her life. Her murderer enters at the end of this brief section:

QUOTE The new separator was working. The rest of the equipment was scheduled for checkout. Ari made notes by hand, but mostly because she worked on a system
and the Scriber got in her way: in some things only state of the art would
do, but when it came to her notes, she still wrote them with a lightpen on
the TranSlate, in a shorthand her [computerized] Base in the House system
continually dumped into her archives because it knew her handwriting:
old-fashioned program, but it equally well served as a privacy barrier. The
Base then went on to translate, transcribe and archive under her passwords
and handprint, because she had given it the password at the top of the
input.

Nothing today of a real security nature. Lab-work. Student-work. Any of the
azi techs could be down here checking things, but she enjoyed this return
to the old days. She had helped wear smooth the wooden seats in Lab One,
hours and hours over the equipment, doing just this sort of thing, on
equipment that made the rejected separator look like a technologist's
dream.

That part of it she had no desire to re-create. But quite plainly, she
wanted to say/in her write-up of this project. She wanted her stamp on it
and her hand on the fine details right from the conception upward. I was
most careful, in the initiation of this project--

I prepared the tank--

There were very few nowadays who were trained in all the steps. Everyone
specialized. She belonged to the colonial period, to the beginnings of the
science. Nowadays there were colleges turning out educated apes, so-named scientists who punched buttons and read tapes without understanding how the biology worked. She fought that push-the-button tendency, put an especially high priority on producing methodology tapes even while Reseune kept its essential secrets.

Some of those secrets would come out in her book. She had intended it that way. It would be a classic work of science--the entire evolution of
Reseune's procedures, with the Rubin project [cloning Specials] hindmost in
its proper perspective, as the test of theories developed over the decades
of her research. IN PRINCIPIO was the title she had tentatively adopted.
She was still searching for a better one.

The machine came up with the answer on a known sequence. The comp blinked red on an area of discrepancy.

Damn it to bloody hell. Was it contamination or was it a glitch-up in the
machine? She made the note, mercilessly honest. And wondered whether to
lose the time to replace the damn thing again and try with a completely
different test sample, or whether to try to ferret out the cause and
document it for the sake of the record. Doing the former, was a dirty
solution. Being reduced to the latter and, God help her, failing to find
solid evidence, which was a good bet in a mechanical glitch-up, made her
look like a damn fool or forced her to have recourse to the techs more
current with the equipment.

Dump the machine and consign it to the techs, run the suspect sample in a
clean machine, and install a third machine for the project, with a new
sample-run.

Every real-life project is bound to have its glitch-ups, or the researcher
is lying ...

The outer lab-door opened. There were distant voices. Florian and Catlin.
And another one she knew. Damn.

"Jordan?" she yelled, loud enough to carry. "What's your problem?"

She heard the footsteps. She heard Florian's and Catlin's. She had confused
the azi, and they trailed Jordan as far as the cold-lab door.

"I need to talk to you."

"Jordie, I've got a problem here. Can we do it in about an hour? My
Office?"

"Here is just fine. Now. In private."

She drew a long breath. Let it go again. Grant, she thought. Or Merild and
Corain. "All right. Damn, we're going to have Jane and her clutch traipsing
through the lab out there in about thirty minutes. --Florian, go over to B
and tell them their damn machine won't work." She turned and ejected the
sample. "I want another one. We'll go through every damn machine they've
got if that's what it takes. I want the thing cleaner than it's providing.
God, what kind of tolerances are they accepting these days? And you bring
it over yourself. I don't trust those aides. Catlin, get up there and tell
Jane she can take her damn students somewhere else. I'm shutting down this lab until I get this thing running." She drew a second long breath and used the waldo to send the offending sample back through cryogenics, then
ejected the sample-chamber to a safe-cell and sent it the same route. When
she turned around the azi were gone and Jordan was still standing there.

This is as close to a clear picture of the "crime," if indeed it was a crime and not a complex accident, as Cherryh ever gives us. The irresolution is typical. But so too is the patient build-up of detail, of which every smallest item is totally consistent with everything else we are told, anywhere in the novel. No one in Cyteen is any more black-and-white than are any of the book's inanimate furnishings, whether small or large or in-between. Ari is "mercilessly honest" about an experimental error, and fantastically careful about the necessary follow-up. She is also casually arrogant and profane, simultaneously an egomaniac and a person of great and patient consideration. Which matters more, the positive or the negative? For Cherryh, obviously, the answer is regularly: neither.

And Ari senior prevails. In Cyteen's penultimate chapter, Justin Warrick suddenly looks up at Grant, an azi of Alpha status specially and purposefully designed by Ari, and sees him "as a stranger would, in an objective way he had never looked at Grant, the unlikely perfection--Ari's handiwork too, from his genesets to his psychset. // Everything was, everything. No good, any longer, in fighting [her] design. Even Grant was part of it. He was snared, he had always been. / She wanted Jordan. Jordan failed her. She saw to my creation. Designed Grant. // Fixed me on her ... // Everything's connected to everything--" (604) Cherryh is completely conscious of that universal connection. "Everything is related to everything," she says in the Amazon.com interview already cited from--and then she adds, "especially in my writing."


How many writers have both that degree of awareness and the literary power needed to make their thought brilliantly real, passionately true, and beautiful?

(*) Just as Cervantes has Don Quijote making absurd mistakes in arithmetic, so, too, Cherryh has the original Ari's "parliamentary" opponent, Mikhail Corain, reflecting that she had died at age "one hundred forty-odd." Don Quijote's and Corain's mistakes are totally in character, and characterologically revealing. So too the recreated Ari, in a state of psychological turmoil after claiming vast new freedoms for herself, at age twelve, uncharacteristically but revealingly fumbles and bumbles over the first Ari's age at death, calculating "a hundred fifty" and, a moment later, "a hundred--twenty-something." Cherryh, like Cervantes and indeed all masters of literature, constantly "works" stories and readers, to the enrichment of everyone and everything concerned. That sort of almost endlessly complex self-enrichment is perhaps the clearest mark of great, as opposed to merely good literary art.




Burton Raffel is an internationally known writer and translator and a frequent reviewer of contemporary poetry.


COPYRIGHT 2001 Fairleigh Dickinson University
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group

Port Eternity (1982), for example, is an absorbingly passionate study in isolation and dream-worlds--not "fantasy" fiction, which Cherryh also writes (and which I will not here discuss), but plainly "science" fiction. The novel's narrator is Elaine, an android servant on the private spaceship of lady Dela, a rich and spoiled aristocrat, who amuses herself by naming all those who serve her after the Arthurian characters in Tennyson's Idylls of the King (freely quoted throughout) and having them constantly act out those roles. Dela's current voyage becomes, unwittingly, her last, when her ship and all its occupants are seized--they do not know how or why, if there is in fact a "why"--by a silent, unbreakable, unknowable power. Dela's response is to stage an elaborate banquet:

QUOTE

We came topside, into that huge formal dining room with the weapons and the real wooden beams and the flickering lights like live flame. All of them who had sat down at table got up again to help serve, excepting Griffin [the last of the lady's paramours] and Dela of course, who sat together at the head of the table. It was a scandalous profusion of food, when we were only then setting up the lab that was, at best, never going to give us delicacies such as this: but Dela was never one to scant herself while the commodity held out--be it lovers or wines or the food we had to live on. Maybe it pleased her vanity to feed her servants so extravagantly; she had brought us to appreciate such things--even Mordred was not immune to such pleasures. Perhaps it was humor. Or perhaps it was something more compicated ...

I trust that, by this point, something of Cherryh's literary range begins to become apparent. We can also see very clearly one of her most distinctively literary traits, namely, her reluctance to deal in straightforward, black-and-white terms. Except in a very few of her earliest and somewhat raw books, Cherryh's work is in many ways an elaborately detailed, wondrously extended commentary on the universe's irresolute subtlety and deeply determined indeterminedness. Port Eternity is a vividly drawn, eerily compelling narrative, for despite the unusual range of her fiction, its analytical depth and imaginative variety, Cherryh remains first and foremost what all of fiction's major figures must be, a storyteller.

The Faded Sun (1978-79), like Cyteen, is a trilogy of novels: Kesrith, Shon'jir, and Kutath. Cherryh--something of a pseudonym, her birthname being Carolyn Janice Cherry--is a trained classicist and archeologist as well as a joyously creative linguist, formulating beautifully conceived languages for her invented cultures as fluently and realistically as she builds the cultures themselves and their intricately evoked settings.

Extraordinarily different from Cyteen in subject and style, filled with bleak but glowing desert landscapes and dark, shrouded characters with burning motivation and the purest of unchanging principles, The Faded Sun may well be in strictly narrative terms more far-reaching, though nothing could be more fully realized. Cherryh's creations are sometimes worlds having no contact with or awareness of humans; more often, as in The Faded Sun, alien and human are obliged, by differing blind circumstances, to closely and vitally interact. In this case, though not invariably in Cherryh's work, the interaction is not only exceedingly violent but involves humans and aliens, each in their own ways, in powerful, dangerous, often fatal attractions to one side or the other. Fascinatingly, these are not necessarily the sides into which they were born.

Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe. rating= 5

a masterpiece, really. that's what I say. this book deserves all the praise that it gets. just read it.

Among his later works is ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH (1987), a polyvocal text with multiple narrators. The story is set in an imaginary West African state where Sam, a Sandhurst-trained military officer, has become President. Chris Oriko and Ikem Osodi, his friends, die when resisting brutal abuse of power. A military coup eliminates Sam. Beatrice Okah - Chris's London-educated girl friend - is entrusted with her community of women to return the political sanity.

oh, and of course I *LOVED* the Igbo-English creole scattered throughout. I loved getting to figure out the patterns and realizing what they were saying.


notes/observations:


page 51---

"[...] the most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable, and... just plain uninteresting."

page 88---

"It simply dawned on me two mornings ago that a novelist must listen to his characters who after all are created to wear the shoe and point the writer where it pinches."

"One of the things you told me was that my attitude to women was too respectful."

page 89---

"The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration. She caused Man to fall. So she became a scape goat. No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her. That is Woman in the Book of Genesis. Out here, our ancestors, without the benefit of hearing about the Old Testament, made the very same story differing only in local color. [....] Whatever the detail of Woman's provocation, the Sky finally moved away in anger, and God with it.


Well, that kind of candid chauvinism might be OK for the rugged taste of the Old Testament. The New Testament required a more enlightened, more refined, more loving even, strategy---ostensibly, that is. So the idea came to Man to turn his spouse into the very Mother o God, to picker her up from right under his foot where she'd been since Creation and carry her reverently to a nice, corner pedestal. Up there, her feet completely off the ground she will be just as irrelevant to the practical decisions of running the world as she was in her bad old days. The only difference is that now Man will suffer no guilt feelings; he can sit back and congratulate himself on his generosity and gentlemanliness...."

this is so very Charlotte Perkins Gilman.


page 114---

"Because it is only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and directs us..."

this is very Homer. this is the ancient Greek concept of Kleos, the glory and honour that a warrior fight so valiantly for---not to gain rewards in this world so much, but that their story, and therefore their memory, will live on after their death. the story is everything. the story guides the people.


page 126---

"Shut your mouth. Who tell you say we de make small quarrel?"

"Madam, I no need for somebody to tell me when man and woman make small quarrel. When yo see the woman eye begin de flash like ambulance you go know..."

page 130---

"In any event he had always had the necessity in a vague but insistent way, had always felt a yearning without very clear definition, to connect his essence with earth and earth's people. The problem for him had never been whether it should be done but how to do it with integrity."

amen


page 143---

"Charity, he thundered, is the opium of the privileged; from the good citizen who habitually drops ten kobo from his loose change and from a safe height above the bowl of the leper outside the supermarket; to the group of good citizens like yourselves who donate water so that some Lazarus in the slums can have a syringe boiled clean as a whistle for his jab and his sores dressed more hygienically than the rest of him; to the Band Aid stars that lit up so dramatically the dark Christmas skies of Ethiopia. While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.

....

That world of yours will be in heaven, sneered one gentleman. Even in heaven, said another, there is seniority. Archangels are senior to common angels."

work for a REAL change in things, because your $25 donation does not release you from responsibility to your fellow humans and the world in which you live. it shouldn't lull you into thinking that everything is okay now.


and it's not okay to think that you can't make things better than they are here in this life. no, it won't be heaven. but it can be better if you get off your keister and actually work towards it, with your heart in it, real change and not just your token charity. saying it will only be better in heaven is just your excuse.


and apparently, some of you are being generous not even to be proud of yourself but so that everyone will know how wonderful and saintly you are and you will be abundantly rewarded for that. AND you think that you have done more than necessary for the unfortunate because you are better than they are anyway.





page 187---

"...but more so by far than Yours Sincerely who, don't forget, is one of the troika of proprietors who own Kanga itself!"

ah! glorious! a reference to Gogol's Dead Souls! wherein Gogol made a direct and famous comparison of the Russian state to a troika, travelling with such speed and purpose that other countries simply had to get out of its way... nevermind that inside that troika sat ensconced a thief and idiot. here, Achebe goes even further. Oriko, being at one time under the impression that the Kangan state was directly under his influence, realizes that he is not even a thief in the troika! no, he is but one of the three horses pulling it. ;)


he even put in a naming ceremony on page 206.


and again, one of the most perfect endings of a book I've read. 5!

Chinua Achebe

who has read Chinua Achebe's work? I only very recently discovered him, and I've therefore only read Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah (his first and a much later work, respectively). I think I'm reaching for Arrow of God next (alas it might be a while; see my to-read pile!).

the man is amazingly talented with words, world-building, and characterization. he can be very economical in his writing, straight to the quick and every word, every image is exactly what is necessary to convey his meaning and carry the story. he can also be very philosophical and soul-searching, when his characters are and when the situation calls for it. his stories are very human and real--- there's no real heroes or villains or any "correct" viewpoints involved (though a character might think of his viewpoint as supreme) or preaching of a moral. you feel as if you know the people personally somehow, as if they are quite real, and correspondingly complicated without being constructedly so. you come to understand the world they populate in a short time, as if you've been there, as if you could put the book down and find yourself there.

amazingly talented.

anybody read him?
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/achebe.htm

3rd of love, man'chi, and all that jazz

to go further with my last post...

to say that emotions are intelligent and involve choice and evaluations is one thing, but can you really choose who you love?

traditionally, the answer is no.

however, it all has to do with your self-definition, the definition you have for yourself. when a person is stuck in an abusive relationship, and claims that she (she, for the sake of conversation) can't leave because she loves him, and indeed she does love him and she will forgive him anything, regardless--- what therapists/friends work with her about is not trying to tell her that she can't love him and to love somebody else, but to get her to re-evaluate her self-definition. they try to get her to realize that she is a beautiful, worthwhile individual who deserves better, and only when she recognizes that and thinks that of herself will she be able to remove herself from the situation. and, doing so, often she realizes that she does not love him anymore. and it isn't because she just turned off the emotion, and it isn't because of the fact that he hurt her etc (he hurt her for a long time and that didn't bring about this response), it's because she adjusted her self-definition to such a degree that his behavior was no longer seen as tolerable, and she chose to disconnect from him.

it is not a cut-and-dry matter, but there is a level of choice here.

or, do you choose when you will get angry? if someone behaved deliberately, and did something that is generally unexcusable, but you knew that in *their* culture it was considered highly flattering... you might have to stop and think about whether you should be angry or not. it depends on how he meant it. and the fact that you stop and think means that you do choose. and that there might be a "right" time to be angry and a "wrong" time or circumstance as well. and those evaluations depend on your self-definition (which includes what would be offensive to you).

etc etc etc

also, the mededeni believed (?) that an ateva could associate with anyone/everyone they met, which is definitely not an absolute reliance on the hierarchy. there seems to be some choice there on some level as well, even beyond what might ordinarily be acknowledged as the level of choice regarding man'chi.

and so the question is: to what extent is your self-definition... enculturated?

if part of your self-definition is that you are part of a certain culture, and this understanding might be on a level you are or are not highly aware of, then your culture and its rules/ideas/concepts about "the way things are" are going to affect you and your self-definition.

perhaps the (Ragi?) atevi have the hierarchal-man'chi-structure because that is what came up in their environment (I'd love to dismiss the atevi animal world, since it is going to complicate this lol, but I won't; I just won't discuss it right now). perhaps an ateva brought up in a culture where it was okay for one's superior to feel attachment towards oneself, and that reinforced one's purpose instead of destablizing it (ie, the human way of things), then that ateva wouldn't feel absolutely discombobulated when such a thing occurred. because, to that ateva, such a feeling was not warranted. it would not be "right" under the circumstances. and that ateva would have to be quite enculturated before he truly started to "feel" along the same lines, because you don't think about such things, usually, before you feel them. usually, it is somewhat automatic. pre-processed, based on known data.

same with a human raised in a hierarchal-man'chi culture. or a paidhi who finally was actually enculturated in the Ragi scheme of things, who really started to see the order and the method behind the culture and therefore started to be able to process what happened around him, in that culture, at the gut level.

because when you think that man'chi is cold and distant and without feeling, that seems to me to be quite wrong. that an atevi only attaches to certain other atevi does not mean that they don't have strong feelings towards those other atevi and are not much happier because of it. and to think that an aiji doesn't need you personally, only needs someone to fill that spot in the hierarchy, that purpose, well...

then you need a reality check, to realize that humans don't need a particular person to love as well. any adequate person will do. in fact, part of the process of love is bestowing/projecting favorable attributes upon the beloved in order to make it a better match. if it doesn't work out with one person, then another might come along. and if you had never been born, your partner would not have been doomed to loveless hell forever. there would have been somebody else who fit in with their self-definition at least as well. humans need somebody to love, or at the very selfish least, somebody whose purpose in the relationship is to love them. that's the purpose of the beloved: to connect them with the world and reality and other people and also help to define oneself.

and yet that is not to say love is cold and unfeeling. and humans usually don't sit around and deliberate on who they will love or if they should love somebody else instead. it doesn't work quite like that. and neither does man'chi, I'd say. the aiji needs followers, or s/he's a rogue aiji, a failed and crazy person. they need followers, they need the upward flow of man'chi, the way that humans need others to love them, and for the same purpose: to connect them with the world and reality and other people and also help to define oneself.

the fact that Ragi atevi are not as loud and obnoxious and brazenly familiar with their emotional displays does not mean they don't feel emotions, after all. that's just cultural too.

or for now it is lol

more on love, man'chi, and all that jazz

currently re-reading Foreigner

i'm going to try and say this without going off on all possible tangents... wish me luck...

this is somewhat mine and somewhat me paraphrasing others here...

Bren (at least Bren, at any rate, and the other humans, supposedly) tends to automatically make a distinction between intelligence and emotions. not surprisingly so, as many people do, but one must argue that they are not really separate categories as such, and also that emotions cannot really be reduced down to "feelings"... it seems to me that Bren is often upset because the atevi don't "feel" the same way as humans do... again that is going down the wrong path... he's missing the point. an emotion is not just feeling weak in the knees, or feeling a shiver up your spine, or feeling the blood rush to your face, or even feeling sad, mad, proud...

emotions are engagements with the world, and as such, they are much more complicated than that. when a person gets angry, it involves judgement--- one judges that they have been wronged or offended or misled or betrayed--- and it is directed towards something (usually someone) in the world, and it is usually intended to right that wrong or demand justice. when a person gets scared, it is prompted by something in the environment (the mental environment if nothing else), and it is intended to give one the extra boost of speed or to make one stop dead still and hide---it is a direct, usually proper reaction to the world (improper reactions tend more towards phobia and panic than "fear"). and then of course, take an emotion like grief, which is obviously a process, and even involves other emotions like anger and denial--- it is directed at, in this case, a personal loss, and also at one's own future end, and it is intended to give one pause to refigure one's life now that the loss has happened and also to re-evaluate one's life in the light that we all die and maybe need to get our affairs/act together to avoid problems for loved ones and their memory of us.

dagnabit I'm going off on a tangent already... well I want to go on in this vein but for now the emphasis is on: emotions are engagements with the world. they do involve a kind of intelligence, they can be quite intelligent actually, even though they are not in the same category as logic, but the important thing is that emotions are engagements with the world.

they are part and parcel of the process in which we define ourselves (define who we are are individuals and as communities, etc), which is an ongoing, ever-adjusting process; they are how we connect with each other; and they are how we connect ourselves to our reality.

humans (generally speaking, for the purposes of this conversation)... how do I put this? humans are many-tendrilled things. lol. ok, I mean that humans engage with the world in many varied and prolific ways... humans tend to latch on to many people, many things, many places and take all these things into their definitions of themselves (they define themselves in terms of relationships to these things, personally)... humans tend to connect to whatever looks good, whatever looks promising... humans seem to want to connect with their reality in as many ways as possible, as if they are hanging on for dear life.

since we're primarily discussing love and man'chi--- Merkins tend to use the word "love" to such an extent that god only knows what it means any more: we love our families, our friends, our sweethearts, our pets, our cars, our homes, our flat-screen tvs, our country, our lofty ideals, our favorite song, our pizza, our new shoes, our cell phones... and we could use all those examples, in the context of defining oneself in terms of relationships to things/reality, but maybe we should stick to "love" referring primarily to people and places one is really bound to... just for now anyway.

so humans connect to other humans, not completely indiscriminately... oh no, not indiscriminately. we (whether knowingly or unwittingly/subconsciously) surround ourselves with or attach ourselves to people of a certain kind, and those relationships help to define us. it helps us to feel secure. love being a two-way street in good conditions means that if I love you, then you define me (or figure into my self-definitions of me) and I define you (similarly). being needed by another--- or, more to the point, by [i]all[/i] the others that we love--- helps us to feel secure too.

our love-relationships (and again, not meaning erotic or even philial love, as love could be for pizza I guess if that's how you define yourself??? people say it, at any rate) define who we are and provide us with peace and stability, such as anything ever does--- that's the purpose behind it all.

and humans work that way.

but atevi, apparently, to my understanding, are not many-tendrilled things. :atwink


they don't latch on to here and there and her and him and everything else. this would not help them to feel secure and peaceful; to them it would be utter chaos and disorder and great unrest. they're not clinging to reality in all kinds of directions.

they, instead, find their place in the hierarchy. others test them, and they test others, in the quest for finding out who fits where in the hierarchy, which is an ongoing, ever-adjusting process. bihawa. they find where in the hierarchy they fit, and, having found their place, they are secure, comfortable, and happy--- as are the others in the hierarchy, now that everyone's niche is well-defined.

finding their niche in the hierarchy, and serving the purpose which inherently comes with that niche, defines them. that is all the definition they need. that is the only connection they really need--- any more would throw the arrangement into disarray (although I know that's an oversimplification; an ateva can have competing man'chiin; they're not quite happy in that situation however; also there are lesser man'chiin, I know).

also, they derive their purpose from the hierarchal structure, so much so that man'chi only flows one way. while they apparently want the upward flow of man'chi from subordinates (and sometimes from equals? not sure), because it reaffirms their position and purpse, they'd be completely discombobulated if the object of their man'chi (say the aiji/etc) somehow felt man'chi to [i]them[/i], because the hierarchy would collapse, and that would rob them of their purpose. their purpose in life, really, at least to some extent, would be threatened with horrible ambiguity if not outright overturned.

atevi always make me think of mandalas, and everything being beautiful, deceptively simple, and in perfect order. this is where they derive their peace and purpose.

if a human could find his/her place in an atevi hierarchy (as Bren apparently does, whether he realizes it or not), then he'd get that satisfaction of being needed by his subordinates, appreciated by his equals (those who had similar man'chi, anyway), and fulfilling a purpose for his superior (which is, in a way, also a variation on being needed).

so, really, it isn't that the atevi don't [i]feel[/i] many of the same things that humans do, they just have different ways of satisfying those emotional needs. they have different ways of engaging with/handling/ connecting to the world/reality. and it's not something that is entirely without intelligence or choice, as long as one is aware of the choices (or the possibility of choices). (how many people would be "in love" if they didn't know the word?)

there is potential for at least a human to fit into an atevi society (as we see, with Bren, already), and maybe for an ateva to fit in with a human society (in theory; I really doubt one could find enough order to keep an ateva sane, living with humans! :rolleyes: I mean, good god, I wish I could find my niche; I wish I knew what my purpose was! I daresay the atevi are onto something!)