The Awful Vitality of the Machine

Lord Dunsany, The Last Revolution (Part 2)

The Last Revolution is about the possibility of robotic conquest, but the danger implicit in the story is more tied to psychology than the iron fists of automated overlords.  Artificial intelligence appears to trouble Dunsany on many levels.  First, there is a disorientating sense of human inferiority, a debasement of the arrogance towards nature that characterized so much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  It’s not simply the intelligence that is the problem with the machines – but their capacity to use that against us, to put it to practical application.  The narrator observes, “… I was more surprised to see the monster doing a simple act with a shovel than I had been to see it outmoding one of the best-established openings at chess.”  Likewise, as it works at assembly, “It was as though I had seen a dentist drilling a patient’s tooth… and with the other hand at the same time doing an etching…. It was terrible to see how easy its two occupations evidently came to the monster, and how rapidly and efficient it was dealing with them.”

Artificial intelligence, for Dunsany, is capable not just of logic but of emotion – for Pender’s robot was made in the image of humankind, and so shares its complexities and psychological energies.  The monster is not happy that Pender has a woman in his life: “there it sat with its jealousy of Alicia smouldering to glowing hatred.” 

The monster builds new monsters.  So, of course, “The central concern of my worry was simply this: could those things go on reproducing themselves?”  When the narrator later refers to the machine’s “awful vitality,” he means its strength, but that strength is not unique – it is replicated in all the subsequent machines, like an iron strand of DNA pushing aside the softer coils of the human genome.

The threat of this artificial intelligence is crystalized into one unforgettable moment of violence: “And before we could do anything it had torn the dog to pieces and was holding the pieces up so as to let the blood run all over it.”  The narrator calmly notes, “Its idea of eating, I suppose.”  Yet the action is never really explained.  Was the monster mimicking and corrupting human consumption, trying to generate oil for its gears, or simply indulging in experimental bloodlust?

“I say,” says Pender.  “Is that quite right?”

Image: Rodin Museum, Philadelphia

Electric Revolution

Lord Dunsany, The Last Revolution (1951) - Part 1

This book was an unexpected delight.  I had heard good things about Dunsany before – and you have to appreciate someone who could inspire authors as diverse as Tolkien and Lovecraft.  Nevertheless, the austere elegance and philosophical richness of this book really surprised me.  Do yourself a favor and read this under-appreciated masterpiece – then come back and muse with me.

In chapter one, Ablard Pender declares, “I have made a brain.”  We soon discover that it is a mechanical brain – a construct of wire and electricity, ultimately encased within a multi-limbed body of iron.  The philosophizing of the book begins early and rarely relents – but it’s so interesting and woven into such a charming story that I can’t complain.  Thus, Pender – confident that his machine will prove a dutiful servant to mankind – quickly indulges in a slave fantasy: “It will give us the leisure that slaves used to give the Romans.”  Indeed, the themes of slavery, machines, nature, and revolution interact in a delicate dance through the pages of this work.

It sounds serious – but this book is also very funny.  When we meet Pender’s aunt, the narrator reports “I rather gathered that she disapproved of her nephew for wasting his time with science, instead of being a chartered accountant….”  Pender’s creation looks like a crab, but is the size of a large dog, and has a hundred claw-like hands.  It’s hard not to laugh when Pender moves the thing into the house in a wheelbarrow, hoping to prevent his aunt from realizing that the mechanical construct is actually sentient.  Ablard tells the narrator “she thinks it’s remote control.”  As the narrator starts playing chess with “the monster,” he complains, “It was watching me intently, rather as a cockroach watches one.”  It’s absurd and comical and creepy, all at the same time.  Fantastic!

Camp Crusaders! - The Bookworm Turns / While Gotham City Burns

Batman, Season One, Episodes 29-30

Personal Rating: B

Villain Spotlight:

Bookworm has clothes that look like “rare old book bindings” – and they make quite a statement.  His not-quite-there stare is amusing, too.  And his “hissy fits” as a frustrated novelist are pretty impressive.  What makes such behavior more tolerable than that of the Riddler, for me, is that Bookworm calms down with such completeness and suddenness.  Furthermore, you have to appreciate a villain that gives orders by referencing pages and paragraphs of his plans.  He grades his henchwoman a C- for misquoting Robert Burns!

The Zen of Camp:

Bookworm tries to sell a copy of the 1919 Congressional Record to Aunt Harriet – and assures her that the illustrations are “so piquant.”

“Reverse bat climb.”

Other Notes:

English history gets an unfair rap!  Boring?  Surely not!

A Fear of Stone

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Part 6)

“And far to the north… there was an unused quarry greater than all the rest; from which had been hewn in forgotten times such prodigious lumps and blocks that the sight of their chiseled vacancies struck terror to all who beheld.”  Here, it is the absence of the stone – the spatial ghost, as it were – that marks the scope of sculptural efforts, and thus their horror.  The concept is reversed later, when Carter actually encounters some soaring monuments: “But now those hills were hills no more, for some hand greater than man’s had touched them.  Silent they squatted there atop the world like wolves or ghouls, crowned with clouds and mists and guarding the secrets of the north forever.”

Part of stone’s terrible power lies in the fact that it is not organic – it has no life in it, but depends on the craft of some intelligence beyond its boundaries.  And for Lovecraft, there are always monstrous hands eager to produce some evil art.

The fear of stone, though, really solidifies at the “prehistoric” monastery of “the high-priest not to be described.”  “There, all alone in the hush and the dusk and the cold, rose the uncouth stones of a squat windowless building around which a circle of crude monoliths stood.”  Monoliths, of course, are a favorite image of Lovecraft’s – stone daggers piercing earth or sky.  Here they crown or honor an unholy constellation of stone, within which dwells some agent of Nyarlathotep.  Eventually, Carter must escape from “hopeless labyrinths of stone” – a notion that echoes the dreadful ruined city of the Elder Things in The Mountains of Madness.

Part of stone’s menace, then is in its lifelessness – but it is also empowered by its antiquity and its capacity to bridge the notion of architecture (cities, monoliths, and monasteries) with that of earthly forms (mountains and crags).  Stone is the bone of the world – the skeletal horror beneath an organic husk:  “All this while there had stretched before him the great corpse-like width of fabled Sarkomand with its black broken pillars and crumbling sphinx-crowned gates and titan stones and monstrous winged lions against the sickly glow of those luminous night clouds.”

Image: Piranesi, Getty Open Content

Camp Crusaders! - The Curse of Tut / The Pharaoh's in a Rut

Batman, Season One, Episodes 27-28

Personal Rating: B

This episode has a subtle Lovecraftian vibe – if you can imagine such a thing in the campy world of Gotham City.  Batman calls Tut’s conspiracy a cult, and Commissioner Gordon suggests that it is “unearthly.”  Of course, Victor Buono’s Tut isn’t exactly a model incarnation of Cthulhu-y trouble…

Villain Spotlight:

Somehow it’s not that hard for me to imagine a professor from an elite academic institution developing a god complex like King Tut.

Social Commentary:

Commissioner Gordon: “Heartwarming indeed, Boy Wonder, the way a distinguished millionaire like Bruce Wayne cooperates in the fight against crime.  Not all millionaires would be so self-sacrificing.”

Robin, regarding the police: “They’re great guys, Alfred, but they can be a little heavy handed, too.”

The Zen of Camp:

“Unclean!” protests Tut when “Nefertiti” offers him a hotdog. 

“Gosh, Batman, is there anything you don’t know?”

“Yes, Robin – several things, in fact.”

Inversions in the Wilderness - The Hobbit, Ch. VI

Tolkien may be more widely appreciated as a storyteller than as a stylist, but his combination of simplicity and sophistication continues to amaze me.  Consider the following passage, as the group escapes from the goblins: “at times they were marching along quiet as quiet over a floor of pine-needles; and all the while the forest-gloom got heavier and the forest-silence deeper.”  Aside from the obvious, but delicate and effective, instances of repetition, we have a subtle but effective inversion.  It seems to me that gloom would normally get “deeper” while silence would be likely characterized as “heavy.”  Yet here the darkness has weight and the silence has dimension.  Perhaps I’m making too much of this, but the linking of the two menaces to the word “forest” at the least encourages the reader to move back and forth between the concepts, making it easier to imagine their substitution for one another.

Let’s consider a clearer instance of inversion – and one that is utilized for comic rather than rhetorical effect.  When the dwarves take refuge up some trees, the narrator notes, “You would have laughed… if you had seen the dwarves sitting up in the trees with their beards dangling down, like old gentlemen gone cracked and playing at being boys.”  Here, expectations are wildly inverted – old men, after all, don’t belong in trees.

As a third example, we might focus on what I’ll call “cosmological” inversion – the flipping of the natural order of things, the transformation of the biological and spiritual rubric by which humans orient themselves.  Simply put, we’re introduced to talking animals.  The wolves provide a dramatic scene: “hundreds and hundreds, it seemed” “went and sat in a great circle in the glade; and in the middle of the circle was a great grey wolf.  He spoke to them in the dreadful language of the Wargs.”  By inverting animal and human behavior (the dwarves like birds in trees, wolves talking below) Tolkien stretches and twists our sense of reality on a number of levels.

Image: Princeton University

Anarchy and Armor in Scooby-Doo

Scooby-Doo Review: What a Night for a Knight

The scope of this episode is impressive.  There are archaeological antiquities and natural history specimens.  Shaggy shows off some wild gymnastics skills.  An old-fashioned plane takes to the air – inside a building!  And there are cool creepy touches throughout – like the fact that the kidnapped professor is actually tied up and on display in one of the exhibits, or the armor sitting motionless in the driver’s seat of a van at the start of the show.  The episode manages to have a spooky vibe, despite a potentially mundane monster.  Add some brilliant sound design and an expressionist labyrinth of light, shadow, and iconography and you have a worthy beginning to the masterpiece saga that is the original “Scooby-Doo, Where are You?”

Have you ever noticed the anarchism of the gang?  They break into the museum without permission, Shaggy smashes priceless antiques, and Scooby “appropriates” a pair of glasses.  Some of it’s the anarchy of comedy – treating the world like a jazz tune or a playground.  But some of it’s a sense that the mystery trumps all else – that the quest for knowledge is more important than the rules.

 

Shaggy remarks several times that the “Black Knight” – a suit of armor – is alive.  The underlying assumption is that it is inhabited and manipulated by a ghost.  Of course, the defining the feature of a ghost is that it is not really alive.  Otherwise it would just be an organism, an exotic animal.  This is, I suppose, the paradox of the undead – the possibility that someone dead is returned to “life,” but in some alternative and usually monstrous form.  Yet this begs the question – in what sense is the Black Knight alive?  In the usual tradition of Scooby-Doo antagonists the armor just emits a kind of growl, so we know it isn’t establishing its life-force by means of language and communication.  Ultimately, it must simply be the motion of the knight – the movement.  And the whole question of how a living suit of armor functions is rather interesting, too.  There are, presumably, no muscles and bones in there – so we are left with either a metal construct that disobeys the normal laws of physics, or a spectral influence that emits no visible sign independent of the metal.  As Daphne says, it’s a “creepy hunk of tin.”

But to return to the question of life – if we accept Shaggy’s judgment on the matter – we must confront the possibility that life is not limited to the normal categories, but includes the fusion of the elemental and the ephemeral – the mixture of sullen substance and spectral urgency.  If the Black Knight is alive, then so is the earth, and the sea, and the whole of the unfathomable cosmos.  Our jittery hippie is probably just following a false lead provided by the criminal, who planted the story.  Even so, that’s pretty deep stuff from a guy who spends most of his time worrying about lunch.