The Lesser Sound and Fury
by rsbakker
So a storm blew through last Tuesday night, a real storm, the kind we haven’t seen in a couple of years at least. I was just finishing up a disastrous night of NHL 13 (because NHL 14 is a rip off) on PS3 (because my PS4 is a paperweight) with my buds out back in the garage. Frank fled. Ken strolled. ‘Good night, Motherfucker.’ ‘Goodnight.’ The sky was alive, strobes glimpsed through the Dark Lord’s laundry, thunder rattling the teeth of the world, booming across houses lined up like molars. I sat on the front porch to watch, squinting more for the booze than for the wind. There had been talk of tornados, but I wasn’t buying it, having lived in Tennessee. No, just a storm. We just don’t get the parking lot heat they need to germinate, let alone to feed. The air lacked the required energy.
The rain fell like gravel. Straight down. Euclidean rain, I thought.
But there was nothing linear about the lightning. The first strike ripped fabric too fundamental to be seen. The second had me out of my stupor as much as out of my seat, blinking for the instantaneous execution of night and shadow. Everything revealed God’s way: too quick to be grasped by eyes so small as these.
I stood, another animal floating in solution. I laughed the laugh of monkeys too stupid to cower. I thought of ancient fools.
The rain fell like gravel, massing across all the terrestrial surfaces, hard enough to shatter into sand, hanging like dust across ankles in summer fields. Then it faded, trailed into silence with analogue perfection, and I found myself standing in a glazed nocturnal world, everything turgid… shivering for the high-altitude chill.
I locked up the house, crawled into bed. I lay in bed listening to the passage of thunder… the far side of some cataclysmic charge. I watched white splash across the skylights.
And then came the blitz.
BOOM!
Something—an artillery shell pilfered from some World War I magazine from the sounds of it—exploded just a few blocks over. The house shook everyone awake.
BOOM!
Closer than the last—even nature believes in the strategic value of carpet bombing.
We huddled together, our small family of three, grinning for terror and wonder. I spoke brave words I can no longer remember.
BOOM!
Loud enough to crack wood, to swear in front of little children.
The next morning I awoke to the smell of a five year old farting. It seemed a miracle that everything was intact and sodden—no hoary old trees torn from their sockets, no branches hanging necks broken from powerlines. It seemed miraculous that a beast so vast could stomp through our neighbourhood with nary a casualty. Not a shrub. Not one drowned squirrel.
Only my fucking modem, and a week to remember what it was like, back before all this lesser sound and fury.
Three Pound Brain 
You really love the word ‘hoary’ don’t you?
To think I missed having internet.
Looks very cool. Well timed as well, tho not so much for me!
PS4 is not a paperweight…you haven’t played Bloodborne!!!….oh yeah….still waiting for The Unholy Consult…😯
My daughter loves Disney Infinity, I suppose.
Aside from CoD, I’m more a sports gamer, myself.
Hahah… welcome back!
Yea, we get these great big summer tsunamis here in the Phoenix area when the mud rains so thick you fingerpaint your love messages in it.
Ah, lush, broad strokes for a natural event, the big unknown licking in – rather than a post of the miserly manyfold intricacies of cognitive science. Bonus points – it’s some technology that dies at the end for a change! I’ll have to have my weather witch send more storms that way!
And yeah, I’ll go banal and ask: did you find out where the bolts hit, if it was that close?
My neighbour had a lightning rod installed. Those things fricken work!
Wow, no wonder it was so close – I guess it saved the building at price of thunder which might otherwise might have not hit that house anyway. A metaphor!
Hi Scott. Sorry to spam you here on your blog, but is there any way to pass a message up to you? I have a matter of some personal importance I am keen to discuss.
Best,
Jonathan
Hi, Jonathan. Sorry for the delay (we just got back yesterday). Normally I would say you can reach me via my contact form on the author website, but I’ve been remiss answering unsolicited emails of late (too many people angry about the delay for the book = too many days ruined by vitriol). Send something with caps in the subject line and I’ll keep my eye peeled.
I saw this a couple of years back. I find it vaguely frightening. The Inverse Problem in a nutshell, illustrating the crazy kinds of intersystematicities instrumentation makes possible.
I’m pretty sure we got that same storm ahead of you, here in Chicago. They had the tornado sirens blaring, a chilling sound, like whales calling across the deep. My animals were all huddled at my feet while I tried to keep writing.
Weather is for real in Chicago. It reminded me of my Nashville days – only, peaceful, like. I was there when the tornado hit 2nd Avenue!
I feared a TTT scenario. Glad to hear it was only a mild affliction.
That whirlwind be in my skull!
[…] showers and “Euclidean rain” (that phrase from Scott Bakker’s evocative post The Lesser Sound and Fury). Here the trees are close in and it can be difficult to really appreciate a good […]
https://soundcloud.com/intelligence2/william-gibson-on-zero-history
I once experienced that kind of storm in Austin, TX many years ago. There was one really loud bang, the ear-splitting kind. It was definitely a lightning strike, one that was too close and it scared the crap out of me at 2 am. In the morning news I saw it hit my favorite hangout spot by Lake Travis and burned it to the ground. No casualties, since it was 2 am and there was no one there but the place was totally destroyed, it took about a year for them to reopen it.
After living in the South, I have been disabused of the belief that the North suffers extreme summer weather.
Texas summer storms are legendary. Hurricane Ike almost erased Galveston from the map. Hurricane Katrina was total devastation. And then there are the tornadoes, hailstorms in the middle of summer. I was happy to get away from the awful summer storms and flash floods of Texas, but alas, now I’m enduring the endless torrents in the middle of July thousands of miles away.
hey RSB, what’s the word on yer philo book?
If people really buy into a lack of free will, they will start doing whatever they please? How does lack of free will and doing whatever you will go together? Granted it was the interviewer summerising that, but WTF?
And the whole ‘postponing’ stuff – what, were postponing how your rock keeps away dragons, thus we don’t have a theory at all?
Not coloured all the way down…okay, I got lazy in listening, only did six pages…
Traditionally, doing things widely removed from your usual constellation of habits and expectations is taken to demonstrate something like libertarian freedom or having the capacity to do otherwise.
Skeptical that a traditional notion is going to be involved if we take this ‘no free will’ statement phenomena as being a new one.
Really the idea could do with some cognitive science run on it, ironically.
Musta been another storm…
Nope. Just some distance. 😉
Mr. Bakker may we have a publishing news update? If there is something your fans could do, we would do it! Should I write to the Pope?
I’m supposed to be getting some details this week, but I’m not sure (I just got back from the backwoods). From what I hear, however, the collective call has been heard! I’m still marvelling over it, actually.
“The Coffers, boys!”
“The Slog of Slogs!”
“Today is the day we turn around!”
Please, please, please let this be good news! Dare I hope?
We (i.e. Madness’ cronies at SA and the guys at the Westeros board) have been petitioning hard. I sure hope we have helped the situation!
Lol – the crux between Bakker’s authorial life and my fanaticism has given me cronies…
I think we might have organized a better campaign if more than 1% of Bakker book buyers actually engaged on the internet. Or if more than 10% (being generous) of those on the internet participated in querying Overlook over social media.
The shout was heard. I’ve already been chastised by my agent, though no one is quite clear as to what I should feel bad about, and everyone does seem to remember me. I feel like Syndrome in the Incredibles.
When enough Sranc howl at the Gates they must be answered.
Hopefully we will get some solid information.
Lol – why is anyone chastising you?
Also, when you’ve news to share, you’ve got quite the platform available to you. Between MG’s bakkerfans social media accounts, Second Apocalypse forum, and the TSACasts, you can reach a large swath of your internet-savvy fandom (and a number who aren’t so much inclined).
And actually, I’ve been meaning to bug you about joining me on a Cast for a shit-shooting session. It’s as simple as setting a Skype call and I can only imagine how the soundcloud account would blow up proportionately. And you know my other schemes to get you interacting with the fandom. But as there is news.
Cheers, buddy.
Funny you should say that, some of the more restless among us were suggesting getting your agent’s contact info so we could hound him as well XD
Off-topic, but hilarious.
http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/index.htm
No one ever seems to consider this when they talk about a chinese room.
That’s the sentence I got from the generator – dunno if it’s relevant.
Proof that jargon need not mean to do heavy lifting! It’s got me thinking about Lewis’s description theory for some blasted reason.
http://www.philpercs.com/2015/07/philosophers-who-write-science-fiction-or-fantasy-part-2-eric-schwitzgebel.html
He forgot to mention all the time I spent pestering him on the absurdity of analytic philosophy ignoring the mad consequences of technology! 😉
Interesting read that I see you posted too on Edward Feser’s site: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html
Problem with his argument from “incoherence” is that it presupposes a coherence theory of truth to justify his ploy against eliminativist theories. Of course he elides this from the post, and assumes that a coherence theories of truth are completely foundational and defensible. Yet, as we know there is a whole tradition from the Sophists, Stoics, Lucretius, down to Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze, Fodor, and many others: McNeil etc. that tell us that the very notion of Truth itself is to accept the Platonic theory of Ideas as real: that of Idealism itself. That the very basis of propositional thinking is itself based in “belief” in Ideas and concepts as “real” … mental. But of course this is old news… yet, reading his post I was amazed that no one bothered to bring up the notion that his very stating of the question is false.
He’s battle against dualism takes in only Descartes and the dualism between scientific statement in quantification and mathematization as against qualia, etc. leaves out that whole tradition from Hume, Spinoza onward of the affective or physical aspects of desire, etc. That one can have affective relations to the world without intentionalism, etc. And, that for the most part our evolution has been based on our affective relations to the environment rather than on this notion of self-reflection or first-person singularity, etc. That for the most part Third Person subject impersonalism has been the longer course of evolutionary subjectivation.
What was interesting in Feser is that he is bounded by his box, that he has no clue of all these other traditions of anti-represenationalism, anti-intentionalism… as if the Coherence Theory of Truth were just an accepted fact like other natural facts, when in fact it is an artificial construct and a kludgy one at best that bases its main theory on propositional thought as foundational.
I dont see you / Deleuze/ Guattari / et al and Scott coming to an agreement on this! I was listening to Delanda go on about Deleuze again today, and he explicitly says it: Deleuze was building a spiritual world view, and in Delanda’s view, and I quote, “The philosopher can give us what science can’t”, which is a world view.
I’ll assume you no nothing about the coherence/incoherence post that was mentioned? So all you’re reiterating is Scott’s objection to philosophy per se as if it were a mute point. So be it. No point debating with a dogmatist whose made up his mind that the sciences have the “truth”. It’s as if you guys are building an empire for the blind like Plato himself built the Republic; yet, he ousted the Sophists and Poets, you instead are going to oust everyone accept scientists from your paradise of knowledge and truth; and, especially your main enemy: the philosopher.
I was skeptical of his position as well but I don’t recall it hinging on coherentisn about truth. I think what he said was by globally suspending intentionaliam Scott barred himself from access to the suite of useage he still cast his picture in (this is the position of basically scanning the bbt for normative terms and flagging it as a ‘contradiction’ because it simultaneously denies normative metaphysicsand not even engaging with the contents of bbt)
enjoy your symptom:
old news, i know, but i am too fucking ADD to read his thousand page book, plus it’s a really concise presentation of his theory
He has an open source précis which is quite good. I can’t recommend the beast itself enough, though.
Well, he assumes his assumptions, I guess you can say. In the absence of rough ground, people stomp their feet, plain and simple.
Have you ever read Blindsight by Peter Watts, Craig? I would love to see your take in print. For Peter, ‘blindsight’ is simply a metaphor for affect as you use it here, and the human assumption that aliens will be sentient, as opposed to merely sapient, is treated like the conceit it is.
Just woke up… no, I haven’t. Guess that’s another one to put on my radar! What has been interesting of late is in my rereading of certain ethnologists and anthropologists of late that many primitive societies seemed to have had non-intentional forms of awareness based on a Third-person or impersonalism… so have wondered if your intentional consciousness is after all a socio-cultural construction over millennium of reinforcement? Have you come across any specifics in your research in this or other areas beyond the neurosciences? I know when both Guattari and Deleuze died most of these newer breakthroughs had yet to come about, but that they were heavily read in the (neuro)sciences of their day (obviously still connected to the cognitive terminology at that time). Seems Deleuze’s move toward impersonalism and dividuality divorced from First-person view was part of this… they see the schizophrenizing process itself a manifestation of this affective form of relationism with the First-person singular having been shattered…
More and more my concern is not with philosophy per se but with how our governments – or, even shadow governemental entities will use the neurosciences knowledge to their own militant militarism in the next century… obviously the neurosciences will be weaponized – so what does this actually entail in the way of crowd control, insurrection, and war? More I read neurosciences the more terrifying are the prospects to which its new knowledge will be put in the hands of both military-industrial complex and the surveillance-securitization-complex. Makes me think neuropath is not only accurate but probably already happening in some deep shadow cover operations. And, I’m not even a paranoiac 🙂 haha
just a freckking realist who knows what the CIA and other governments (U.S.A., Russian, China, etc.) have done in the past…
Hey craig got any citations re the anthropology you are talking about here. i’ve been doing some skimmy of neuroanthro lately, myself.
is this it?
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
Yes it is… But buy the book, dammit!
[this is not your conscience speaking, just another self-interested party]
love Blindsight, definitely overlaps with fans of Bakker’s stuff
Just re-read. You write up a storm; a sheer zest for colour and incident. Wonderful stuff.