Our Climate of Fear

This guide to spotting postal bombs was circulated in the University a while back, and I think it's worth preserving for posterity. Some of the tips are probably useful, but some later ones sound... just a touch paranoid. I especially like #8, 'There may be poor handwriting, spelling or typing'.

POSTAL BOMBS
THE TELL-TALE SIGNS

• Grease marks on the envelope or wrapping
• An unusual odour such as marzipan or machine oil
• Visible wiring or tin foil, especially if the envelope or package is damaged
• The envelope or package may feel very heavy for its size
• The weight distribution may be un-even [or] the contents may be rigid in a flexible envelope
• It may have been delivered by hand from an unknown source or posted from an unusual place
• If a package, it may have excessive wrapping
• There may be poor handwriting, spelling or typing
• It may be wrongly addressed: or come from an unexpected source
• There may be too many stamps for the weight of the package

The Things I Find In Neighbouring Tabs...

Manhunt 2 doesn't represent... insightful commentary... This is killing, maiming and torturing for the sake of it... In making such a game Rockstar has been juvenile, shameful and irresponsible.

From Robert Fahey's Gamesindustry.biz editorial on Manhunt 2 and the BBFC

"Typically, I would come into work to find that the über-boss had been pressuring my workers in the dark of night, and wild idiotic ideas had sprung into life," [Paul] Kidd recalls. "Ideas such as enemies whose heads could be severed, allowing giant blood snakes to form out of the blood hosing from their carotid arteries. So these sorts of things were eased onto the 'back burner' pile, and then the burners were turned on, incinerating these concepts for the good of all humanity."

From a GameSetWatch retrospective

Now I have vague visions of surprise early morning wranglings over blood snakes... I imagine trying to hold together a team of people with creative and sometimes unworkable ideas must be quite a challenge, even without having to worry about non-artistic and non-logistical aspects like 'social responsibility' (whatever exactly that is).

Fahey thinks it's a good thing that the BBFC 'has largely kept pace with changing social mores and an increasingly liberal view of art and media in the UK'; I think it reflects the intellectual bankruptcy of the legal and scientific basis for much of the Board's work, which leaves it trying to keep pace with whatever people en masse seem to be doing and willing to tolerate. Imagine trying to predict what the Board will judge to conform adequately to public mores while also addressing all the other concerns that beset large-scale creative projects. If you were advised not to make the finished product 'too cruel, callous, unpleasant and disgusting to be granted a classification', as Fahey characterises it, you'd have trouble translating that into meaningful terms even if they weren't subject to re-evaluation should the social wind change.

Some People Cringe At Things Like This...

Ouch!

Just moments ago I'd never heard of a 'folksonomy'.

Restaurants and Repercussions

Some interesting comments about the role of cultural production—in an article about bizarre legal wrangling over whether a negative review counts as defamation.

For a long time the issue of whether a scathing review of a book, film or play was defamatory has been left substantially untested... because, though activities such as publishing or filmmaking have, historically, often been conducted through commercial means, they were not defined by it. Cultural activity was an exchange within the public sphere to be contested at that level.

In recent decades this relationship has shifted, as cultural production has started to come to the centre of the economy. This has prompted, and been prompted by, a shift in the understanding of what cultural creation is – it is now the creation of cultural capital (in the literal economic sense) with a market value far and beyond that of old-style industrial capital.

I'd like to think it needn't be such an either/or, but maybe that's wishful thinking. Indeed, given some of Peter Drahos's comments about Marxist alienation in relation to intellectual property, quite possibly the horse bolted long ago. Of course, I regard this as a question with significant moral dimensions, and therefore am not particualarly impressed by economic imperatives. (Maybe legal questions like this will prove serendipitous... but perhaps not.)

‘...stalking and brutal slaying and the sheer lack of alternative pleasures...’

It's not so long since we were hearing about how the BBFC thought games might actually be less dangerous than non-interactive media; and while, now I've read that report, I take the view that its authors were guilty of both minor howlers ('Virtual Fighter', 'Mortal Combat') and the broad structural error of assuming that being a hardcore gamer is a matter of spending lots of time gaming, on the whole it wasn't bad, as these things go. Still, I did have reservations about some of the assumptions in play about how media effects might operate.

Now, of course, we're still reeling from the Manchester Cathedral incident; and today the BBFC has refused a certificate to Manhunt 2. (Technically, the PS2 and Wii versions; according to Gamespot the PSP version hasn't yet been submitted.)

I'm not going to talk about what Gamasutra lightly calls the franchise's 'somewhat unique reputation' in the U.K., or about whether this game I haven't played (and wouldn't care to buy if I were permitted to) does in fact resemble the BBFC's description. As usual, I want to look at the description itself (quoted in full in the Kotaku article). However...

Manhunt 2 is distinguishable from recent high-end video games by its unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing. There is sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged, in the game.

Although the difference should not be exaggerated the fact of the game's unrelenting focus on stalking and brutal slaying and the sheer lack of alternative pleasures on offer to the gamer, together with the different overall narrative context, contribute towards differentiating this submission from the original Manhunt game... [and] the Board's carefully considered view is that to issue a certificate to Manhunt 2... would involve a range of unjustifiable harm risks, to both adults and minors, within the terms of the Video Recordings Act, and accordingly that its availability, even if statutorily confined to adults, would be unacceptable to the public.

Okay, so much for that... I don't know what an 'overall game context' is. I don't know why 'bleakness' should be problematic. I don't see why a 'lack of alternative pleasures' should be significant; maybe the idea is that violence is less of a problem if chosen than if required by the game mechanics. I don't know what counts as 'alleviating' visceral killing – does Cooke mean with respect to the victim, i.e. by killing quickly and without unnecessary pain, or with respect to the sensibilities of the viewer? – and I don't know why the lack of 'distancing' is a bad thing. (What happened to that all-important 'sense of reality'?)

I'm irked because I have before me a statement about how a proscribed piece of software 'encourages' violent acts – there isn't even care in distinguishing between encouraging in-game acts and encouraging real ones – and it's too poorly constructed to be taken apart. I don't particularly hold that against the BBFC, who after all have simply put together a simple press release to explain to the public at large their implementation of the Video Recordings Act, itself a stupidly written piece of legislation. Hopefully the Board will release transcripts of its deliberations; and hopefully they'll turn out to have given the matter something at least resembling serious thought.

[Update: Since I may as well add some more links for easy reference... ELSPA is pleased. Meanwhile the ESRB has given the game an Adults Only rating.]

Rambling About Isolation #3

More on isolation and realising the universal (I'm afraid), with especial reference to loneliness.

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I seem to have wandered pretty far from my list of various examples showing the variety of ways in which isolation can be structured in terms of the absence of others; or at least, I haven't drawn out the connections... Maybe I shouldn't place such an emphasis on the 'ethical' significance of the universal, just because Kierkegaard did; or alternatively perhaps I should employ a wider understanding thereof. I think it's fair to say that there's typically an evaluative or even normative element in isolation: the absence of others takes on a positive flavour (restful or liberating solitude) or a negative one (nobody there to help, nobody there to understand...). It doesn't strike me as being compatible with indifference—equanimity, yes, but that's not the same thing. If you don't care whether you're alone, then your being alone is just another fact among many facts, not a positive constituent of experience.

With respect to loneliness it's perhaps intuitive that it isn't a normative attitude towards the propriety of human contact but a yearning for togetherness. Where I think it may be possible to associate this with the universal is in its orientation towards the rightness of an 'us': towards disclosure (trust, understanding), public activity (contact, help, co-operation) and interpersonal structures (friendship). What's desired is not merely that there be other human entities present but also that one stand in certain relations to them: for example, the spy may desire someone to trust and who can act as a confessor. So one desires to orient oneself in terms of certain public relations—or, to realise the universal.

I wonder how much this really has to do with the Kierkegaardian universal... Certainly both A and B strike me as in some sense loveless. (Wilhelm goes on so much about his love for his wife it can sound as though he's trying to convince himself; though to be fair, how could it be better put, save through poetic veiling?) It doesn't matter that much, since I'm not pretending or aiming to write a commentary on Kierkegaard.

Now I said previously that it was possible to realise the universal while isolated – by regulating one's actions such that they were understood in essentially public terms – and clearly that isn't a cure for loneliness. Something needs revision. Actually I think it may be this possibility for action-regulation that gives loneliness much of its texture: one can – by choice – get so far before one's progress is frustrated. It's precisely because it is possible to understand oneself in terms of public structures that the absence of an actual public, and the inability of one's will to conjure it up, forces itself upon consciousness. (Especially when one can perceive others who have managed to actualise concrete relationships: under some circumstances the presence of others can increase loneliness.) The way in which one conducts oneself ceases to be self-contained/self-sufficient, but one's predicament remains one of disconnectedness. (Readying oneself for what may never come, because one can never ordain that it be bestowed—when all handshakes are left-handed.)

This needn't be particularly a matter of moral norms and principles. It's a wholly unoriginal thought that the scope of ethics is properly wider and includes fluffier and fuzzier things. (Ellie Crouch was talking to me at the last seminar about the necessity of being understood to human wellbeing...) Actually the Hegelian/Kierkegaardian universal perhaps needn't be that far from Aristotelian eudaimonia. If there's anything bothering me about the role of ethics here it's that I'm not convinced that what's most important in particular human relations really can be encapsulated within the universal. (Which is where the question of marriage gets interesting for me, but that's for another day...) Just take the case of friendship: I don't think someone with near-identical personal characteristics could ever act as a substitute for one of one's friends. (A good friend in his or her own right, probably, but in no sense a replacement.) So even the love that binds close friends seems to me to escape the question of what one does.

I think I have to conclude that what one can do on one's own in realising the universal is in the end limited and indeed rather sterile—as indeed one might expect. It's recognised inside one's own mind and dies when one dies (and hence no solution to 'existential loneliness' [.doc]). What one in the end does is take up a kind of stance that's always inviting connectedness and so always frustrated by its absence; so one doesn't discover oneself alone and become lonely, but becomes vulnerable to loneliness through realising the universal and... finding there's still something evading one.

I've almost forgotten what I was aiming to prove... Well, there's the voluntary aspect. (Being ignored is always worse when you're actively trying not to be...) Beyond that it's a question of priority: I don't think it's remotely controversial to suggest that loneliness arises from a need rather than being a simple response to a situation, but I'd like to place it further back than 'needing people', at the 'needing to need people' level: loneliness is itself a possibility to which one opens oneself up. (The pains associated with community can be great, but somehow more meaningful than estrangement...) More succinctly: loneliness is made possible by realising the universal.

For the Next Trick, I'll Need a Volunteer...

Hopefully this post will be less vague and better focussed than the last one on my dissertation topic. (Discovery of the week: it's hard to do philosophy while listening to Nightwish. Normal service will resume someday...)

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I need to think some more about the voluntary aspect of moral structures... As regards isolation it's clear enough that there can be a voluntary element: one chooses to accept or decline an invitation to some gathering, for example. One resolves to become a hermit. One chooses to entrust others with some piece of sensitive information, or not. This last example reflects a kind of epistemic isolation; and I wonder whether there's some sense in which one can be even more subtly isolated, or not: that of whether at root one feels 'one of us', whatever anyone's actions might suggest about the matter.

That is something else I definitely need to deal with: the actually fairly flimsy connection between the fact of being alone and the understanding of one's situation in those terms. The loneliness of crowds, and so on. (There's also the fact that isolation as a long-term state can survive encounter: Philip Koch has quite a lot to say on this in Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter. Incidentally, yes, I'm using the term 'isolation' in a manner of which he'd disapprove.) Which I think is digestible in terms of a phenomenological us/other. If you're on a desert island and feeling the absence of any other human being, then any human presence will serve as the 'us' presence that breaks the sense of isolation. Whereas if you're a spy, keeping the truth of who he is from those around him, then those others can never be the 'us' presence that dispels the isolation (unless you decide to switch sides); indeed, it seems reasonably intuitive that the more you get involved with them (creating an 'us' that acts to oppose their 'other' status), the greater the sense of isolation will get.

Back to voluntariness... This doesn't obviously sit well with an us/other structure, which on the face of it looks perceptual and therefore non-voluntary. (As I said before, there are facts about what your connections are that are just facts: you can't rewrite what schools you went to, for example. Forging your C.V. doesn't really count.) Questions about the extent of the moral community, circle, etc. tend to be framed in terms that suggest the answers are to be (rationally) discovered rather than chosen; if we inject choice in there the first thing that comes to mind is personal relativism. This, however, is where I think I can employ Kierkegaard's sense of realising the universal.

The universal is discoverable inasmuch as one can discover what it would be to realise the universal, but precisely because it can be realised, or not, it leaves room for voluntariness. Disclosure is an ever-present possibility for the spy and even for the castaway, inofar as the castaway can choose to live such that he could in principle justify his actions to any audience with which he might come into contact: justification and argument being inherently public practices. (Maybe there's some room for referencing Stuart Hampshire's suggestion that our understanding of rational thought is derived from our grasp of public arbitration: 'The relations between the public activities of deliberating and adjudicating are open to everyone's observation, and their shadows, the corresponding private mental activities, are assumed to duplicate these relations.') So living non-gratuitously is a kind of public/intersubjective practice irrespective of whether there's an actual public.

That still needs to be fleshed out—and hooked up properly to the phenomenology of isolation. The principal difficulty is that there's nothing that realising the universal particularly looks like... Obviously in Either/Or you have the extended Seducer's Diary versus Wilhelm's praise of marriage, but seduction is publicly intelligible (hence presumably the pains Kierkegaard took to emphasise the subtleties of his seducer), and the mere public act of marrying is eo ipso just that. Unless one does have a case like that of Abraham to work with, pointing to what people actually do won't be very helpful; even if you do, do we have a clear idea of what the Attunement is supposed to show...? (Not the way I remember it from first year Reading Philosophy.)

Well, there's nothing solitude particularly looks like either... One thing probably worth flagging up is the manner in which isolation can be liberating: Sartre captures some of it, but basically in contradistinction to how the park looks once the Other has appeared. Out of the public gaze one is liberated to do... whatever one sees fit. Yet as I said above, there's a kind of seeing fit which is nonetheless public, i.e. one understands oneself as an agent in the public moral world. So there's another sense in which isolation also illuminates one's own personal responsibility—which again sounds quite Sartrean. (No refuge—from one's own eyes...) Except that Sartre emphasises choice (leaving aside the argument about whether he encouraged gratuity). So we've got this strange tension between the possibility for spontaneity and the correspondingly hightened possibility for adopting public standards.

This is where a case study would be really useful... Well, suppose I'm walking alone in a lush, quiet forest, and suddenly I come upon that common feature of the modern British woodland, the discarded plastic bag. A normatively construed aberation: that which intrudes where it has no place; moreover, someone has discarded it, i.e. its presence discloses conscious agency, responsibility, culpability. (Perhaps a betrayal or dereliction of duty with respect to our shared public space...) So now suppose that I have emptied my own plastic bag (having eaten my lunch), and the possibilities are open to me of discarding it or carrying it home. There is also the prior possibility of understanding this decision in terms in which I appear as the discarder of the other plastic bag appeared to me: and once I have recognised that possibility, even though no footsteps are approaching and so no actual Other is coming to fix me in his disapproving gaze, nevertheless I recognise my act as a public one—and now the possibilities open to me are of acting in the manner of a responsible person and taking my bag home, or discarding it anyway; I can no longer 'just' choose whichever suits me.

Something like this can be the case even for the 'last man', even though nobody else will ever see the plastic bags he discards, and he may enjoy the colour they lend to the landscape. He may judge that it no longer matters whether he litters, but this judgment is made already within the ethical, i.e. it involves his addressing the question of what responsibilities he bears or does not bear given certain possible public/objective standards. If, that is, he's realised the universal.

‘Now on my own, / Never to see / Summer again...’

There seem to me to be various ways in which experiences can be positively structured in terms of the absence of others: for example, restful solitude; recuperative solitude; loneliness; a mixture of regret and relief once one’s dinner party guests have departed; the unnerving realisation that, should one find oneself in difficulties, nobody is around to help; and the drama suggested by boldly going where no man has gone before, or by opening a tomb in which no human foot has trod these past thousand years...

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What I'm currently playing with is the idea that what's revealed through the phenomenology of isolation is something along the lines of the Kierkegaardian Universal, i.e. a voluntary structuring of one's attitudes to life in terms of practices which are at least in principle open to public disclosure and comprehension. Which doesn't necessarily replace the Mitwelt in which 'Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with' (Being and Time), but rather suggest another and, significantly, a voluntary layer on top.

This is going to be tricky to characterise; I think what I'll do is take the 'last man' scenario as a case study. The way I remember it from undergrad. environmental ethics, it amounts to imagining that only one member of the human race is still surviving on Earth (and in some versions, that the animals have gone too), then asking whether it would be wrong, say, for the last man to destroy all the forests. Typically this gets framed in terms of questions like 'can plants have intrinsic value?' and 'can there be duties to ecosystems?' What I propose is that in asking such questions one presupposes that the last man is already embedded within structures of ethics which are 'public' in the sense that they involve publicly intelligible reasons for how one acts. (The 'last man' isn't imagined as any man in particular, more of an archetype.)

Regarding 'public intelligibility' I have in mind Problema III of Fear and Trembling and its statement that 'ethics demands disclosure': not always an actual act of disclosure but the possibility of making a publicly intelligible defence of one's actions (because 'the ethical is the universal'). What I get from this is the possibility of living one's life 'in the public eye' irrespective of whether there's an actual public to observe. (Actually, putting it like that reminds me of Foucault... but the Panopticon isn't something one adopts willingly, and it relies on actual possibility for observation.)

So far, so Mitwelt: the chairs that are for someone to sit in; the glasses for me, you, others to drink from. However, ethics isn't just 'there' to be inescapably inhabited; it's something that requires (or at least invites) voluntary adoption, even wilful commitment. (I'm possibly slipping somewhat away from Kierkegaard's understanding of Hegelian ethics here, but certainly the Kierkegaardian ethical seems on the face of it to be chosen—hence Either/Or.) It isn't exactly social integration either, although there certainly is a relation (hence Judge Wilhelm's emphasis on marriage in particular, in contrast to Abraham's predicament): certainly it's possible to be isolated whilst still having a certain social position, i.e. being in the predicament of belonging to such-and-such a birth community, holding or having held such-and-such a station, and so on. But that too is inescapable, by virtue of being part of one's history in the public world; some of it has been voluntary in the sense that one chose it, but (without particularly wanting to invoke Sartrean facticity) once chosen it becomes part of the public furniture of one's life.

This will need fleshing out, but at any rate those are the two aspects of ethics I want to play up: the public aspect and the voluntary aspect. Then I've got to hook them up to the phenomenology of isolation. My starting point is the observation that phenomenologically (as well as definitively), the various forms of aloneness are positively characterised by the absence of others—not like Pierre's absence from the café, where it's specifically Pierre who's absent, but the absence of others as a totality. (Actually that's a bit of an extreme characterisation—but more of that another time.) One can play with examples like those in the first paragraph, which at least show some variety and nuance. (Maybe a problematic amount of variety...)

That gives us a public aspect: a structuring in terms of others but no others in particular, not the Sartrean Other who wields 'the look' and structures surroundings about himself but a never-actualised (or perhaps, never-particularised, never-instantiated) public. I don't have Kierkegaard's sense of 'the public' particularly in mind, but I do like the way the word suggests one's own membership: it's not 'the Other' that performs this structuring (objectifying?) role but something in which one participates, in which one has a role oneself. Certainly in the case of loneliness I think it's not so much that 'the others' are absent as that 'the rest of us' are: the sense of disconnectedness depends on a sense of connection and togetherness. (Maybe a normative sense, even?)

That already has quite an ethical ring to it, or at least that of a moral community. (A momentary digression: a phenomenological look at the parable of the Good Samaritan might be worthwhile. What's it 'like' to perceive someone as one's neighbour, i.e. in some sense a fellow member of a shared community?) Not that it's particularly the community of all rational beings, or the expanding moral circle, or whatever. (Nor the Mitsein community for that matter.) This (as I seem to have said above) is going to be tricky to characterise...

‘Something Long and White’

One thing I found quite interesting back when I was working on the phenomenology of atmosphere was discovering that Rudolf Otto and H.P. Lovecraft say some quite similar-sounding things about stories of the fearsomely supernatural, but use them in quite different ways. Both agree that there's a relation or continuum between the narrative genre (and the responses it evokes), superstition and more developed religion. For Lovecraft, an atheist, this consists in their being all rooted in and explicable in terms of the same psychological phenomenon: 'cosmic terror'. (He also appeals to 'our innermost biological heritage'; maybe this dovetails with his fairly notorious views on racial difference. The hints in the essay regarding connections between biological heredity, psychology and culture give only a sketchy picture, and I'm not familiar with his correspondence, etc.) Supernatural Horror In Literature is mostly concerned with narrative technique, but the opening remarks provide some wider contextual detail.

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The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it...

Man's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand – and the universe teemed with them in the early days – were naturally woven such personifications, marvelous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons... [and] an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings round all the objects and processes that were once mysterious; however well they may now be explained.

Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races, and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings. It was, indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborate ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of daemons and spectres, which flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached its highest development in Egypt and the Semitic nations. Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon such things were based enduring systems and traditions whose echoes extend obscurely even to the present time.

For Otto, on the other hand, the numinous is real and really encountered. (More specifically, it's a Kantian a priori category which 'issues from the deepest foundation of cognitive apprehension that the soul possesses'.) So superstition is, and by extension supernatural horror stories are too, manifestations of rough but genuine apprehension of this (empirically) real phenomenon; and there are more and less sophisticated forms of grappling with this same thing. (All quotations here are from The Idea of the Holy.)

Let us follow it up... wherever it is to be found, in the lives of those around us, in sudden, strong ebullitions of personal piety and the frames of mind such ebullitions evince, in the fixed and ordered solemnities of rites and liturgies, and again in the atmosphere that clings to old religious monuments and buildings, to temples and to churches. If we do so we shall find we are dealing with something for which there is only one appropriate expression, mysterium tremendum... It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling and speechless humility of the creature in the face of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.

Its antecedent stage is 'daemonic dread' (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive off-shoot, the 'dread of ghosts'. It first begins to stir in the feeling of 'something uncanny', 'eerie', or 'weird'. It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development in history. 'Daemons' and 'gods' alike spring from this root, and all the products of 'mythological apperception' or 'fantasy' are nothing but different modes in which it has been objectified. And all ostensible explanations of the origin of religion in terms of terms of animism or magic or folk psychology are doomed from the outset to wander astray and miss the real goal of their inquiry, unless they recognise this fact of our nature – primary, unique, underivable from anything else – to be the basic factor and the basic impulse underlying the entire process of religious evolution.

It is the mark which really characterises the so-called 'Religion of Primitive Man', and there it appears as 'daemonic dread'. This crudely na¨ve and primordial emotional disturbance, and the fantastic images to which it gives rise, are later overborne and ousted by more highly-developed forms of the numinous emotion, with all its mysteriously impelling power. But even when this has long attained its higher and purer mode of expression it is possible for the primitive types of excitation that were formerly a part of it to break out in the soul in all their original naïveté and so to be experienced afresh. That this is so is shown by the potent attraction again and again exercised by the element of horror and 'shudder' in ghost stories, even among persons of high all-round education. It is a remarkable fact that the physical reaction to which this unique 'dread' of the uncanny gives rise is also unique, and is not found in the case of any 'natural' fear or terror. We say: 'my blood ran icy cold', and 'my flesh crept'. The 'cold blood' feeling may be a symptom of ordinary, natural fear, but there is something non-natural or supernatural about the symptom of 'creeping flesh'.

The ghost's real attraction... consists in this, that of itself and in an uncommon degree it entices the imagination, awakening strong interest and curiosity; it is the weird thing itself that allures the fancy. But it does this, not because it is 'something long and white' (as some one once defined a ghost), nor yet through any of the positive and conceptual attributes which fancies about ghosts have invented, but because it is a thing that 'doesn't really exist at all', the 'wholly other', something which has no place in our scheme of reality but belongs to an absolutely different one, and which at the same time arouses an irrepressible interest in the mind.

Although it's a striking point of comparison, I'm not sure what one might actually do with it... Actually I'm not sure the two accounts are mutually exclusive insofar as they concern literature. Maybe it counts as an interesting case study of how one's general epistemological and theological views can influence investigation into a specific phenomenon in the world, in this case a branch of literary criticism. Maybe Foucault would have liked it.

Miscellaneous Lists

People I'd Invite To My Dream Symposium - Jorge Luis Borges, Adrian Brown (not the musician but The Subtle Philosopher), Søren Kierkegaard, Rudolf Otto.

It's Pretentious But So What? - New Games Journalism, rational enquiry into the nature of reality, interpreting Paranoia Agent as a Buddhist-Sartrean fusion (in the good old days), interpreting Link's Awakening (Yume wo Miru Shima) as a reworking of The Tempest, getting jostled in Jazz Café and being glad because I was playing at café phenomenology at the time.

I Wonder What Their Dreams Are/Were Like - Yoshitaka Amano, Makoto Shinkai, Masato Kato (nyuk, nyuk, nyuk...), Lord Dunsany, whoever wrote the Voynich Manuscript, Satoshi Kon, Nicholas Roerich, Fumito Ueda.

Never Mind What It Sounds Like, What a Title! - Unfinished Battle With God Syndrome, Embryons desséchés, A Single Desultory Philippic, Dream Island Obsessional Park, The Wompom, Poisoning Pigeons In the Park.

Some Satie-sfactory Musical Genre Terms

A sketchy and partial mapping of how my mind actually classifies music (since e.g. I can deploy the concept 'Celtic', but I don't usually think of Wolfstone and 'Xenogears: Creid' as members of subcategories in a 'Celtic' or 'Celtic influence' category).

1. 'Music to fight the final boss to': obviously including actual final boss themes, but this is one I settled on after listening to 'Enter Vril-Ya' [.mp3] and an orchestral rendering of 'Ride of the Valkyries' in quick succession.

2. 'Music I might manage to quote in a philosophy paper someday': actually includes 'I Am the Walrus', since according to Mr. Brown the first line summarises Hindu tenets and the rest... probably doesn't. Then there's 'The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine'—very Nozick.

3. 'Music that's remarkably good given the hardware': basically exists for certain kinds of chiptune—not just 2A03 covers – thanks to which we have an NSF of 'Tori no Uta', with something of Dr. Johnson's performing dog about it and nothing to be ashamed of for that – but also what Kenji Ito managed with the Seiken Densetsu boss themes (although my favourite versions of those are actually MIDI covers). Oh, and from a different source, Link's Awakening...

4. 'Music that sounds like an... interesting idea': Satie's 'Vexations'.

5. 'Music I'm surprised I like': okay, a completely person-dependent category. For example:

   • Thomas Truax's 'Escape From the Orphanage' [.mp3]. On the negative side, his isn't the most lilting of voices. On the positive side: 'I did it my way, I made a new start, / Just me, my toy piano and my pet bat Bart.'

   • Anything by YMCK. (Okay, chiptunes, but still...) Unfortunately I didn't find a 'Kira Kira' video.