The list of books I want to read to flesh out the world is getting so long. I call this my “Reading to Write” list. Mostly books on topics not necessarily directly associated with “fantasy.”
Currently, I am reading three books that explain how humans form their thoughts and conceptions. Still, more importantly they explain how we end up thinking about a world made for multiple creatures in languages and ideologies specific to humans only. For example we understand what a cat is in human terms since we have no way of knowing what the experience of a cat is.
Here is an excerpt from the book that explains how we filter everything through a human lens. How we assume and presume things about the world that are only important to the being, doing, and living of the human experience:
“Unbecoming: Human Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze by Felice Cimatti”
(This excerpt is edited for brevity.)
Animality can not be understood.
“ Anthropogenesis is the process that leads a living being to utter ‘I’, and therefore step outside of itself and of the flux of its own living, in order to see itself from the outside. Ostensibly, there is always only one body, both acting in the ‘environment’ and saying ‘I’. …An animal language cannot say the world otherwise than it actually is…. In the child’s language, on the other hand, there are some particular expressions – like the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ – that have no fixed referent. First the mother speaks, and says ‘I’; the father then intervenes, and he is the one, now, to say ‘I’. Not only that, but the mother addressed him with a ‘you’, while the father did the same when referring to her. This is a first, not quite reassuring, discovery for the child: ‘I’ and ‘you’ are not like names, which remain attached to their owners (it is well-known how children insist that things should have one name, and only one). Who is ‘I’, then? The child too becomes a ‘you’ in other people’s utterances. Eventually, one day he too becomes an ‘I’: simply, and without great fanfare, he begins to talk. Here lies a big surprise: in order to become an ‘I’, one must simply talk. Nothing more is necessary, we become an ‘I’ – and others a ‘you’ – just by virtue of talking. … In this sense, we can say that there are as many ‘I’s as there are speakers, … But then what is the I, really? It is in the instance of discourse in which I designates the speaker that the speaker proclaims himself as the ‘subject.’….The disheartening conclusion, then, is that the child becomes an I because it says ‘I’. As soon as he experiences the thrill of being an ‘I’, the child has the immediate, sobering realisation of being just one ‘I’ among many….. Becoming an ‘I’ adds an additional factor to his life, something which – as long as, like the tick, he was content living his bare life – he never perceived as an absence. This discovery comes with the realisation that it is impossible to return to the previous condition: even if he was to stop using that word the discovery has already been made, and he is now an ‘I’. …But this self-reference is not a declaration of autonomy. Because an ‘I’ can exist only if there is a ‘you’ that confirms and ‘ratifies’, as Lacan put it, the ‘I’s being. But this also means that the gesture by means of which the body declares itself an ‘I’ is not a sovereign one: without another who accepts being the temporary ‘you’ for a body who declares itself an ‘I’, such self-proclamation would be invalid. ‘I’ am me only because you confirm it. “
Morality is subjective.
And defined by the majority. Morality is not an absolute. There is no morality in the animal world. There are no ethics. Humans are animals first and humans second.
Culturally Llyria will be divided into 3 cultures, but there are effectively only TWO distinct cultures. The third culture is an amalgam of the two distinct cultures.
While I don’t have names yet for the three cultural groups, I know that one group will have dispensed with the words I and you in their daily communication. For this group, speaking of an “I” or a “you” is an act of intimacy that requires them to ask the other for permission before entering into this familiar communicative space.
The seed of this idea for a culture of people who do not rely on “I” and “you” came to me while I read about verbally abusive relationships. In one of the books, the author used the term “psychic assault” to describe a moment when someone crosses a boundary and steps inside your head. They attempt to define or explain you or your behavior. When they are wrong, this feels like an assault of a psychic boundary or that they have forced you into an uncomfortable costume. The term “psychic assault” stuck with me. If words like “I” and “You” were used less in daily communication, I wonder what would happen. How would that enable us to change how we speak about things and each other? What ripple effects would a seemingly small linguistic change have on how we live and think and interact with each other?
(*) Another thing I am trying to distance myself from is the idea of “moral” or “morals .”Personally, I think that notions of “right” or “wrong” or “good” or “bad” are subjective to the majority that uses these words. That there is some way to arrive at a set of wrongs and rights that applies to all people is a convenient illusion. Not convenient for me, or maybe you, but convenient for people who profit from division. It makes it much easier to convince people that they should act against those who are wrong when we believe that only we are right.
“Origins: A John Zerzan Reader” details how the act of controlling nature, provides a context in which the idea of “power over” emerges. His books do not expressly state this but it’s my summarized takeaway. Zerzan is highly criticized for his views that humans need to return to primitivism and forget about technology. I agree with this criticism. I learned from this book that social and cultural ideas could be shaped by how people see themselves concerning the land and where they situate themselves in a larger system. We humans, probably because we can move around and shape the world, seem to think that we have control of or over the world. We could also think that we have control “within” a world system but we do not. The tendency is to situate ourselves OVER or ABOVE the system rather than inside it or part of it. I can’t help but wonder if this “seeing” of ourselves as “above” lends itself to people believing they have the right to acquire control over other people and living beings.
“Wildness and Wellbeing” by Zoe Myers deals with how modern cities are not conducive to optimal mental health. There’s nothing exciting ideologically in this book. Still, I will definitely use some of the examples as ideas for constructing and building the various cities of Llyria.
Books mentioned in this post are:
“Wildness and Wellbeing” by Zoe Myers
“Origins: A John Zerzan Reader” by John Zerzan
“Unbecoming: Human Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze” by Felice Cimatti
Might be worth pointing out that I don’t necessarily believe that the people who wrote these books are correct. I am extracting from their arguments potential ways to “look” at society and making a note of the different ways you can “see and understand” the world around you.
Psychic Assault
Feels strange. As is someone has crossed an unspoken line.