Reading about Krishna for a change

 I gave up on Anne Rice and Isaac Asimov. I had a plan and I dumped it immediately, almost as soon as it I tried to execute it. Its always the execution for me because I start to hate the plan when I execute it. 

It’s always better for me to execute before planning, it’s better to focus on executing so well and perfectly that it doesn’t matter if the plan was good at all. The plan ruins it for me because I put all my execution into the plan. Its better to put all the execution into the execution. Even an amazing plan needs execution. But the execution can save a bad plan. Actually scratch that I don’t really know that. 

I’ve started reading other books, so many books since I tried to read Asimov and hated it. 

Astoundingly, I read all of Mahabharata, the Hindu epic. Instead of reading Asimov, who writes cleanly and simply and is astonishingly transparent with his story and clear, I read a translation of a long inscrutable Hindu epic about Krishna, a divine being who is born as a man and incites his troubled relatives to fight a big war with each other. I won’t try to explain how Krishna is related to the people in the story because it is very complicated because there’s a lot of kings and sages fathering children by many women and various women getting pregnant by multiple kings and sages and gods. And Krishna is just another fellow who happens to be the creator of the universe. To clarify not all Hindus consider Krishna the high god. Some Hindus consider him god, some do not, and just consider him to be an important avatar of Vishnu, who is the main god. One of the three main gods. So I think some consider Krishna to be an avatar of Vishnu and some consider Vishnu to be an avatar of Krishna. It’s a subtle distinction. I won’t try to describe the whole story of Mahabharata here because it beggars description. But I do want to point out that in Mahabharata, Krishna is considered to be the main god of the universe, and I enjoyed the idea that he was just one of the guys amongst all the warriors in the story, people would talk to him and sometimes they would casually refer to the fact that he created the universe, as if they were describing his hometown. And the other people would complain to him quite freely about almost everything because basically everything was his fault. 

Another thing about Mahabharata is that there are infinite narrators talking about narrators talking about stories within a story within a horse sacrifice. The whole story is told to a king to encourage him to make the horse sacrifice, and at the horse sacrifice he asks someone to tell him the story of the horse sacrifice and they encourage him to make the horse sacrifice with a story about a horse sacrifice at which someone tells someone the story and casually mentions that they heard he was planning a horse sacrifice. It turns out he isn’t sure. Should he go ahead with the horse sacrifice? The Brahmins are all for it, but it’s not their horse, is it? 

My second favorite part of the story was the Brahmins. The author critiques the work of several kings in the story, and clearly regards treatment of Brahmins as a critical indicator of a king’s job performance. And tells stories about kings who treat Brahmins well, who are blessed, but tells many more stories about kings who treat Brahmins  badly, and who afterwards get horribly cursed.  Of course one might suspect that the writer of Mahabharata might have himself been a Brahmin, and a not entirely dispassionate supporter of horse sacrifices. 

But one might also note that despite the fact that the kings who mistreated Brahmins always got horribly cursed, there seems to be many more accounts of kings mistreating Brahmins than there are of kings who treated the Brahmins well. Also there are a lot of stories in Mahabharata describing the blessings for women who sleep with Brahmins even when the Brahmins are smelly and dirty. But if they marry the Brahmins they have to practice austerities with them in the woods and get immolated if the Brahmins die first. So the best deal goes to the princesses who just sleep with some old Brahmin, and the next best deal is for the women who marry Brahmins.  The worst deal is for the women who refuse the Brahmins. They get cursed, usually a horrible medical condition. 

Unsurprisingly, the Mahabharata is attributed to the sage Vyasa, a wily Brahmin. He has the gall to describe his own liaisons at the beginning of the story, chapter 1, wherein he fathers the major characters of Mahabharata with various women. Perhaps he’s making some sort of literary metaphor?

Understanding Anne Rice through Asimov

 I’ve done some reading. Not enough that the Rice and Asimov material has fermented together, but I’ve read two Asimov Foundation books, and I’ve read Rice’s The Witching Hour. 

I didn’t really enjoy the two Asimov books so much, so that I lost all my initial enthusiasm for this project and read other books and began playing video games again. I see a pattern and an overall direction to my biography unfolding here, the beginning of a downward spiral into discouraging and disappointing decisions which will lead to an intellectual flaccidity and vegetation. 

Years later after my death, readers, if there are any, of my biography, if I do eventually write it, will understand my failure to grapple with difficult mental challenges at this point in my life as the final turning point, the submergence of any faint glimmer of intellectual light that still exists in my writing. If so, I expect that the only people who might read this or anything else I write will be my own children. Hopefully they won’t be too disappointed. 

I didn’t particularly enjoy most of the Anne Rice book, because most of the book is a dopey soap opera - with a few mildly uncanny moments, but there is a book within the book, the “talamasca” file on “the Mayfair witches” that I enjoyed far more than the main story, that in a better world would have just been sold as the book without the boring frame of the soap opera overlay that is hundreds of pages long with very little happening while the “file” has sex and witch burnings and murders and incest and a spooky ghost all jammed into less than a hundred pages.  Reading it is like finding one of those web sites with the amateur feel that you know could never be published as a book because it’s too short and all the words are misspelled and there’s a clammy awkward feel to the tone like you’ve intruded on someone and they’re unhappy and you’re unhappy that they’re unhappy and you want to make a joke but you can’t.  So I liked that part a lot. Polished writing is drastically overrated. This philosophy should not come as a surprise for any reader of this blog. 

Speaking of polished writing, I attribute my reaction to reading the Asimov books to over familiarity with the stories and ideas. I’ve read them many times and I have to say that with Asimov the Ideas are elucidated very clearly but the characters don’t ultimately feel real to me, except for a few moments with Janov, an elderly researcher who accompanies Golan, the PC of both books. Golan is portrayed as a strong-willed man of action, mostly annoyingly hostile and proud of it, but the interactions between Golan and Janov are very sweet and touching.  It seems to me that Janov must be based on one of Asimov’s friends, for whom he had deep affection but also some subtle contempt. Janov is affable and easygoing, intellectually curious and enthusiastic, but physically timid and socially accommodating. He is portrayed as lacking in practicality, but empathetic. Golan is the singular hero of the two books. Able, forceful, impatient, masculine, and a real turd with other people. He wears thinner for me with each re-reading. More annoying, more dubious. He has a mystical talent for being Right, often referenced to in the book along with descriptions of Golan’s outspoken skepticism of his mystical ability to be right that I don’t know, of course Golan has to show how skeptical he is because the author knows how insufferable the character is anyway? There is an unmistakable “chosen one” aura about the character that I have grown to despise in all literature and film. It’s a sign of elitism in my opinion, a giveaway of the author’s estimation of their main character. “This guy is a loser and nobody will be interested in him so I need to make him the chosen one to justify telling a story about him.” It’s always completely unnecessary. Characters don’t need to save the universe to be significant. 

Asimov most definitely subscribes to the “great man” version of history, it is explicit in his fiction and nonfiction. Even in the Foundation series, which is based on one of my favorite ideas in science fiction, an epic story driven by an advanced mathematical study of history, “psychohistory”, which ascribes the major movements of history as based on impersonal and inevitable historical forces, Asimov unironically ascribes the whole psychohistory theory to one heroic genius who figures everything out. The first book of the Foundation trilogy is a serial about singular heroes who understand the theory and save the day. Asimov does introduce the antihero in the later books,  a person whose singular and unique abilities upend the mathematics of the series. I should admit that I loved the Foundation series the first few times I read them, and I truly admire and appreciate Asimov’s ideas and the spare, uncommon clarity of prose with which he explains them, but the characters in his books are not interesting to me.  Asimov’s fiction is all about the Idea, not the character. Ironically, there’s a line in one of Anne Rice’s books; “Beware the Idea,” that could summarize my complaints about Asimov’s books (the anti-idea theme is one of Rice’s central tenets, or ideas, in her vampire books). 

Okay to be fair, his heroes are thinkers who value facts and truth and reason. But it’s interesting that Asimov, a college professor and intellectual science writer, chooses to keep emphasizing that Trevize is also a man of action. And the sympathetic friend, Pelorat, is an intellectual, and he is depicted as a bit useless in a fight. Maybe a little self-hate from Asimov?  

So we should go over my actual reasons for re-reading books I’ve already read. I had a method, a theory, a reasoning for doing all this that has broken down in the implementation, that has resulted in this posting, this idle chatter in place of the prescise and powerful scientific and mathematically driven screed that I had originally envisioned.  I believe that you don’t really fully understand a book after reading it once. You may enjoy the story, you may react and experience the story as the entertainment as it was intended to be, but you don’t notice much on the first drive through. For me, the true understanding of the book, the  real picture, only comes to you after several re-readings. I’ve experienced this with movies as well as novels. The re-reading, or re-viewing, results in truly revelatory insights. Or at least they feel revelatory to me. But in order to accomplish this, it seems to require a degree of focus that I might no longer be able to muster at this stage of my life. If I was young and relatively undistracted, I believe I could come up with some great stuff, but I don’t really have the time to bear down and re-read books anymore. I’ve stopped this project to read other books or play video games or even work so many times that I can’t even remember when I started on this post with these books in mind. So I would like to apologize to any reader of this blog for the lack of genius insights. Its just a mess in here, really, and I would prefer not to disclose what “here” means and infers and entails to strangers on the internet. No