On Nabokov's Pale Fire

I Made a Video On The "Dictator's Handbook" and Democratic Backsliding

"The Cradle Rocks Above an Abyss"

The opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

From Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco's The Age of Perversion:

Our own existence as conscious animals seems a mere chance occurrence in a vast, overwhelming, mysterious, and impenetrable universe. Yet we hunger for being and life even as we know certain annihilation awaits us. As a spider weaves its web from its own body, we weave our world from the body of our experience, never fully knowing who or what we are or who or what anyone else is. We play our roles, trying to get what we want and perhaps giving others what they want, dealing as best as we can with the conflict that arises when individual desires cross swords. We unfold into life and eventually enfold back into ourselves and die. Like a spider suspended on the slenderest of silken filaments, we hover throughout our existence above the abyss, tethered to life by the thread of our breath, repressing the terror of that certain knowledge. Existence itself as such is already an excessive trauma, and the limit that is one’s death – a complete and final castration – is symbolized in every limit, every loss and every heartbreak. A profound hunger, in every sense of the word, haunts the human creature, who must seek satisfaction in its war with limitation and loss.

On Parenthood

From Hanya Yanagihara's, A Little Life:

I have never been one of those people—I know you aren't either—who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant and grander than any other....But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not "I love him" but "How is he?" The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and I would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life.

... 

And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn't matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It's not biological; it's something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one's genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe's feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what's yours. 

The second thing is this: when your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason—because there is no real deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.

But here's what no one says—when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.

Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is. 

And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

On the Psychology of "Empire" in Literature

Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor

"The Grand Inquisitor," a chapter from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, is one of the most famous chapters in all of literature. In it, Ivan presents a shocking and incendiary vision of organized religion to his devout brother Alyosha. 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Contains minor spoilers.

For me, Philp K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep speaks directly to this political moment. The book deals extensively with themes of empathy, compassion, law enforcement, our thinking about illegal immigrants and criminals, and what it means to be human. Even though it was published in 1968, the book anticipates virtual reality, and the desire to broadcast our experiences and emotions and tap into the experiences and emotions of other strangers in a way that evokes how Facebook and Twitter are used today.

Like other Philip K. Dick novels, Do Androids Dream depicts Earth as a bleak post-apocalyptic dystopia. The plot follows bounty hunter Rick Deckard working for the San Francisco Police Department to hunt and kill androids living on planet Earth illegally. Deckard's work is complicated by the fact that androids are basically indistinguishable from human beings with only the following differentiators:

1. Androids are manufactured in factories (not born) and female androids cannot get pregnant
2. Androids can have memories implanted in their brains (humans cannot)
3. The lifespan of an android is about four years
4. Androids seem to lack an instinctive empathy-reflex that human beings exhibit

In the book, Deckard uses a “Voigt-Kampff” test to measure the empathy-reflex of a subject. To what extent this test measures something meaningful about the “inner-world” of the android and whether androids truly are deficient in their capacity for empathy is an ambiguity that I don’t think gets fully resolved.

Around the middle of the book, Deckard is sitting across from an acclaimed Opera singer named Luba Luft in her dressing room and preparing to administer a “Voigt-Kampff” test to determine if she is an android. Luft carefully evades the questions Deckard needs to administer the test, she suggests that Deckard might be an android himself and suddenly pulls a laser-gun on him:

"You're not from the police department; you're a sexual deviant."
"You can look at my identification." He reached toward his coat pocket. His hand, he saw, had again begun to shake, as it had with Polokov.
"If you reach in there," Luba Luft said, "I'll kill you."

 After more dialog:

Still holding the laser tube in his direction she crossed the room, picked up the vidphone, dialed the operator. "Connect me with the San Francisco Police Department," she said. "I need a policeman."
"What you're doing," Rick said, with relief, "is the best idea possible." Yet it seemed strange to him that Luba had decided to do this; why didn't she simply kill him? Once the patrolman arrived her chance would disappear and it all would go his way. She must think she's human, he decided. Obviously she doesn't know.

Soon a uniformed police officer named Officer Crams shows up at the dressing room and starts interrogating Luba Luft and Deckard. The officer is amazed to see Deckard’s police badge, but when they try to exchange names of bounty hunters and officers that they work with, they are surprised to find out that neither recognizes any of the names cited by the other. Deckard is cuffed and put into Crams police car to be taken to the “Hall of Justice,” but Deckard notices that they are traveling in the wrong direction:

"The Hall of justice," Rick said, "is north, on Lombard."
"That's the old Hall of Justice," Officer Crams said. "The new one is on Mission. That old building, it's disintegrating; it's a ruin. Nobody's used that for years. Has it been that long since you last got booked?"

 After more tense dialog:

Rick said, "Admit to me that you're an android."
"Why? I'm not an android. What do you do, roam around killing people and telling yourself they're androids? I can see why Miss Luft was scared. It's a good thing for her that she called us."
"Then take me to the Hall of Justice, on Lombard."
"Like I—"
"It'll take about three minutes," Rick said. "I want to see it. Every morning I check in for work, there; I want to see that it's been abandoned for years, as you say."
"Maybe you're an android," Officer Crams said. "With a false memory, like they give them. Had you thought of that?" He grinned frigidly as he continued to drive south.

To his astonishment and horror, Deckard is taken as a suspected criminal to a busy Hall of Justice that he has never seen, but not too dissimilar from the one he works at on the other side of town. The plot heightens when Deckard is interrogated by a police inspector named Garland who finds his own name on Deckard's list of androids to hunt. Garland to one of his bounty hunters:

"I don't think you understand the situation," Garland said. "This man—or android—Rick Deckard, comes to us from a phantom, hallucinatory, nonexistent police agency allegedly operating out of the old departmental headquarters on Lombard. He's never heard of us and we've never heard of him—yet ostensibly we're both working the same side of the street. He employs a test we've never heard of. The list he carries around isn't of androids; it's a list of human beings. He's already killed once—at least once. And if Miss Luft hand't gotten to a phone, he probably would have killed her and then eventually he would have come sniffing around after me."

The image of Deckard walking through the Hall of Justice thrown into the surreal and uncanny confrontation with an alternative, but parallel vision of reality has stuck with me for many years and feels particularly relevant in this political climate of "fake news" and alternative facts.