Fie on fie!

Fie on goodness, fie

Fie on goodness, fie

Eight years of kindness to your neighbor
Making sure that the meek are treated well
Eight years of philanthropic labor
Derry down dell
Damn, but it's hell
Oh, fie on goodness, fie

Fie, fie, fie

It's no secret that I've always loved a good fie:

"Fie on ’t, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed." –Hamlet

"Fetch him off, I pray you; he speaks nothing but madman: fie on him!"--Twelfth Night

"Fie, fie, on all tired jades, on all mad masters, and all foul ways!" --The Taming of the Shrew

But the truth is, and I wouldn't want this to get around, I had no idea what a fie was. It's got to be pretty awful, right? Nobody ever fies on the dog when he has an accident in the bedroom. You don't fie on the waitress because she forgot to bring ketchup. Fie is reserved for the absolute bastards of the cosmos.

So finally I looked up fie. And effing eff, it doesn't mean ANYTHING. It's not a blast of lightning, or a bright blade that cleaves a knave from the nave to the chops. It's not even the old fewmets hitting the windmill. It's just an interjection of disgust, like Tchaa! or Tsk! or even Pshaw!

Pshaw!

 This is how curiosity killed the cat. This is the curse of Faust. This is the overweening hubris of Oedipus. This is me wishing I'd never looked up fie. Let fie lie.

But where did the word come from? From French, and Latin (fi!) before that, according to etymologists. Thousands of years ago this monosyllable of disgust hovering just on rebellion bubbled up to the lips of a thoroughly tacked off plebeian and those around him in the forum nodded in agreement. Fie on the patricians, the praetorians, the Vandals and the Goths. When Hamlet uttered it something smelled rotten in the state of Denmark--fie has always been associated with olfactory offensiveness.

The interjection seems to be the red-headed stepchild of the parts of speech, barely even given a nod by pencil-neck grammarians. But when you think of it, interjections were probably the first words humans uttered. Just think of Ook in his cave on a cold dark night. He can't hold it till morning. He gets up to go to the outcave, stubs his toe on a rock in the dark and yelps:

Interjection!

And, yes, I looked it up, and it turns out this very same theory, that language arose from interjections, has been held by thinkers from Democritus to Darwin, and even has a name: interjectional theory--also known as (I kid you not) the pooh-pooh theory. 

 But let's return to fie. How did the word lose its potency, become quaint, amusing even? Do words simply wear out over time, like our other tools? Did fie give place to another f-word? Will we ever weary of that one?

F*** if I know.

And if you think I'm ever going to look up "cleave a knave from the nave to the chops", then fie on you.

Camelot--Fie on Goodness. Cut from the show

in 1961, it never made it to the movie. Restored

for the revival. Seemingly the anthem of our time.

Getting emotional with sci-fi

"My heart is full of X."

  

So we can easily imagine an alien, or a mutant with different abilities, different physiologies: four heads or tentacles for arms or the ability to walk through walls, or even an intelligent shade of blue (I think Douglas Adams came up with that one). But what if an alien or mutant or even just a different earthly species were equipped with an entirely different set of emotions, beyond hate, love, fear, doubt and chagrin. Emotions x, y, and z, a whole alien array, so different from our experience that they in no way correspond to anything in our ken?

We could still witness the physical manifestations of their emotions, like tears or blushing or the spraying of ink, but have no idea of their predicates. Would we be able to divide their emotions into positive and negative reflexes, or would that only mean positive or negative outcomes for ourselves if we responded correctly? What would be the key to unlock their "hearts?" We have a name for every shade of human emotion, yet we can barely even read the hearts of our own species. Probing might turn out to be be a highly decorous form of salutation.

Oh, Lord, please don't
let me be misunderstood

If we throw rocks at an alien, and an alien responds by hugging us, could we therefore assume that having rocks thrown at it is a positive experience for E.T.? And we can interpret their pelting us with rocks in turn as a positive sign? Or is its hug meant as a retaliatory response? Or is the alien simply modeling correct behavior in the hope that we will imitate it and leave off with the rock-throwing? (And how would it feel about being be referred to as an "it?" Does it have unimagined pronouns?) Or is it displaying x emotion? 

We may be able to elicit what we consider positive behavior from an alien or a mutant (provided their emotions are consistent and discrete, a very big if, considering our own emotional variability and opaqueness) but we could never know the impetus for that behavior. Are we perhaps aware of only a small sliver of the emotional spectrum? The aliens might even be able to teach us to access emotions hitherto unknown within ourselves. Perhaps those emotions are the key to inner peace that Tibetan lamas have been trying for centuries to tap into. Is there a numinous emotion waiting to flower?

We can only see a small range if the electromagnetic spectrum. Only hear within a small frequency range. Our ability to smell is shamed by every other mammal on this planet. Why should we think we have a grasp of all available emotions? All our fictional aliens display fundamentally human emotions. Even  the "emotionless" Vulcans merely demonstrate stoicism taken to its (ahem) logical conclusion. Science fiction has done a pretty good job of speculating on how we might establish communication with an alien intelligence. But that is only sense, not sensibility.

 I may be wrong. Sci-fi literature may be chock-a-block with examples of this conundrum. Has anyone come across one of them? Let me know. And if not--well, I'm not a sci-fi writer, so I invite, nay challenge any writers reading this to take up the problem and solve for x.

Sondheim in a Tree

"It strikes me that's what technique must be: the control of the information that
flows from a play to its audience; and in particular the ordering of the information."

--Tom Stoppard

 I want to talk about point of view in narration. It might help first if we think of a novel as a large packet of information, just like the data packets governed by the hypertext transfer protocol (http) on the internet, which delivers data, order, and destination-- which we can translate for our purposes as story, plot, and audience. 

Plot--the ordering, revealing or withholding of information in a story--is especially important in a time-based medium like drama, but also in novels, unless the reader elects to subvert the author's intent by reading the ending first, say, or the author subverts it as in The Dictionary of the Khazars (by Milorad Pavic), wherein he invites the reader to assemble the story in any order they like.  

Point of view directs the information spigot in sometimes subtle ways. First it can be can be additive, as in Toni Morrison's Jazz, with multiple narrators slowly bringing the truth into focus, or or subtractive with an unreliable narrator, sometimes severely restrictive, as in the Benjy Compson section of The Sound and the Fury. Even multiple narrators can be subtractive when the different narrators accounts clash so much that we  are left at sea.

Which brings us to Someone in a Tree, a tour de force musical number from Stephen Sondheim's Broadway show Pacific Overtures. The show is about Japan's (unwilling) opening to western trade in the late 19th century. Under threat of force, the emperor's representatives set up a meeting with the Americans to devise a treaty. We begin with the Reciter (the uber-narrator of the play) bemoaning the fact that there is no authentic Japanese account of what was said that day in the treaty house. An old man appears.

[OLD MAN]
Pardon me, I was there.

[RECITER]
You were where?

[OLD MAN]
At the treaty house.

Wonderful! But it turns out that the old man--who was then quite young--was perched in a tree, able to see, but not hear what went on. And his memory has become clouded by time. To underscore this, we're introduced to the old man as a young boy, whose comments will form a contrapuntal narrative. He demands of his older self:

[BOY]
Tell him what I see!

And of course there are discrepancies in their memories:

[OLD MAN]
Some of them have gold on their coats.

[BOY]
One of them has gold—

He was younger then.

Which is the truer memory? The one closer in time to the events, or the one with an experienced adult's understanding of their import?

But then Sondheim adds another thread to his fabric:

[WARRIOR]
Pardon me, I am here
If you please, I am also here—

--a warrior placed underneath the floor of the treaty house, waiting for a signal to jump out and slay the Americans if they draw weapons. He can hear what is being said. And he's speaking not from memory, but from the actual event. Now we're getting somewhere.

Except we aren't. Because he's not listening to the words spoken, he's listening to movement, he's listening for his cue to act:

[WARRIOR]
First I hear a creak and a thump
Now I hear a clink
Then they talk a bit...
Many times they shout when they speak
Other times they think
Or they argue it...

But when they combine their narratives, is there light shed?

[BOY]
Someone reads a list
From a box

[WARRIOR]
Someone talks of laws

[OLD MAN]
Then they fan a bit

[BOY]
Someone bangs a fist

[WARRIOR]
Someone knocks

[OLD MAN]
Now there was a pause

[OLD MAN, BOY & WARRIOR]
Then they argue it

No. 

But they insist on the importance, the primacy of their involvement in the event, even though peripheral:

[BOY]
And there's someone in a tree—

[OLD MAN]
—Or the day is incomplete

[OLD MAN & BOY]
Without someone in a tree
Nothing happened here

The song becomes a commentary on itself, on the solipsism inherent in narration, and the fictional nature of memory. It shows that the information flow can never be complete, therefore choice of narrator is critical for shaping the story. Plot is tightly interwoven with point of view. All narrators are unreliable. Even a camera has a fixed position. The omniscient narrator can only tell you what the author decides is salient, not every detail the reader might judge necessary. 

So how do we choose a narrator? First person provides immediacy, placing the reader on the protagonist's shoulder, but it cuts us off from any wider view; we can be too close to action, clouding judgment. We can describe the same events from many characters' points of view, but it sometimes tells us more about the various characters than the events.

But should it be the goal of narration to make everything clear? Or is ambiguity  desirable? (Clarity of communication is always a virtue, but thematic ambiguity can make a reading experience richer, involving the reader in its resolution.

In the same talk quoted above, Stoppard also says "Art which stays news is, in Ezra Pound's phrase, is art in which the question 'what does it mean?' has no correct answer."

 In the end, devising a protocol which will deliver data in the most efficient order to reach our destination, we must light upon the point of view that best correlates to theme, to the central questions we set out to ask--but not necessarily answer.

Sondheim's favorite of all his songs, 

Someone in a Tree.

Richard Powers on reading

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

                        --Richard Powers

Favorites:

The Overstory

Generosity: an Enhancement

Gain

Plus, a bonus quote:

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”