Chris Howard's Writing & Art

The ideas and culture required for science

A beautifully concise capturing of the effects of ancient Greek thought, from Ancient Greece, Peter Green (Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1973), p. 99.

The cultivation of an anti-authoritarian, reasonable, humanistic outlook on life is not something that operates in selective patches:  it affects the whole cosmos.  Criticism of the irrational will apply equally to divine cosmogonies and human systems of government. Exploration of physics and meteorology will impinge on a whole range of divine attributes, but it will also affect one's ideas about arbitrary rule on earth.  If Zeus looks a little less impressive as result, so do the tyrant, the king, and the aristocratic "shepherd of the people".  By removing the wild deuce of superstition from their approach to an argument, the Milesians stimulated free criticism and debate.  Once the theology was taken out of causal thinking, it became plain that ideas were, quite simply, competing with one another on their own merits.  To operate by the light of reason alone meant abandoning dogma, and with it the whole notion of special privilege in utterance.  All now could speak; all must listen.

Athena Rocks!

Here's an old watercolor of Athena defeating the god of war, Ares.  (See the "my sketching..." section for the larger version).  I just can't picture Athena wearing thick sandals, hoplite armor and a helmet.  Why would an immortal as powerful as Athena need a helmet?  That is, ceremonial occasions aside, where tradition, formality, etc., stop you from wearing what you really want to wear. What would a goddess really do if she wants to make an appearance on the battlefields of Troy?  She definitely wouldn't show up looking like a man.  She’s going to have Hephaistos bang out some cool divine armor, something a little flashy that shows off her figure, especially if she also has to deal with that meddling bitch, Aphrodite (who always seems to get the credit for looking good). Athena's the goddess of wisdom, war, the arts, industry, you name it.  The Parthenon is the temple of Athena Parthenos.  The little temple of victory perched on the edge of the Acropolis is the temple of Athena Nike.  She presides over the greatest city of the greatest culture the world has ever known.  She's powerful enough to defy the other gods, even Poseidon, to help her friend, Odysseus get home to his kingdom in Ithaka.  She persuades the other gods to defy the dictates of Zeus in the war against Troy, and emerges victorious She's my daughter’s favorite.  I started reading her the Children’s Homer four or five years ago, modifying some of the more brutal sections in the story.  This is a great starter book by the way, with both the Iliad and Odyssey combined and told from the point of view of Telemachus after he's grown up and begins searching for his father.  It's not too long, contains most of the action and is nicely broken up with some fantastic ink drawings by Willy Pogany.  (Children's Homer: The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy by Padraic Colum). My favorite trans. is Richmond Lattimore's, although I also like both Robert Fagles' and Robert Fitsgerald's.  Give me any verse translation that doesn't replace Athena with Minerva! The Iliad's one of those stories you can read over and over again and still be intrigued by new details that you'd previously read but hadn't pulled out of the tale and really focused on. You find yourself thinking about these details long after you've finished the story.  One of the obvious points that every first time reader picks up is that Aias/Ajax goes through the whole thing with little interference from the gods.  Every other major hero is directly affected one way or the other by Zeus, Athena, Ares, Aphrodite, Apollo, except gigantic Aias. He seems to be able to hold his own, even against the divinely aided Trojans, and, although his life’s story ends tragically, you can't help but like Telamonian Aias, and think that this huge, brawling, loyal warrior was, for the most part, unstoppable. During my last reading of Homer I dwelled on how powerful Athena is, and that, even though I've read those same passages several times, it never really struck me that she's the most influential god next to Zeus.  The particular passage that stands out is in book 21 where she defeats Ares.  And I’m not talking about a little scuffle between Athena and the god of war.  She gives him a good sound thrashing, beats him with a stone and lays him out cold: But Athena laughed and vaunted over Ares saying, "Fool, have you not learned how far stronger I am than you, but you must still match yourself against me? Therefore you are paying atonement to your mother’s furies since she is angry and wishes you ill, because you abandoned the Achaians, and have helped the insolent Trojans." Homer, Iliad 21 408-414

Dawkins quote

An interesting quote from Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker:

“Comparisons between modern punctuationalism on the one hand, and catastrophism or saltationism on the other, have a purely poetic force.  They are, if I may coin a paradox, deeply superficial.  They sound impressive in an artsy, literary way, but they do nothing to aid serious understanding, and they can give spurious aid to modern creationists in their disturbingly successful fight to subvert American education and textbook publishing.” –p241 (1986).

I like the phrase, "deeply superficial."

Infinitely supernatural

The concept "infinity" is a troublesome word that can be lumped in with "non-being" and "supernatural."  It can be used properly to refer to a potential, to some measurement from which the size has been abstracted, usually something very large or very small, but can never refer to an actual.  In its proper usage infinity means of indeterminate size or length.  In the context of a particular problem it may not be necessary to know the width, length or boundary of something. Unfortunately, its use spills over into the physical world and it is misapplied to existing things.  Something that is actually infinite cannot exist because it would possess no identity.  All existents must ultimately be determinate, possess a shape or be identifiable in some way. Something without bounds, without end, cannot be identified. The use of infinity in this manner would allow me to make absurd statements like, "I have a ball of string that has an indeterminate length.  No matter how much you try you cannot measure it.  There will always be more string."

Kids:  Yeah, yeah, dad.  Got it.  No infinite lengths of string.  How can you have something with a shape but without any edges?

Um...I stammer something about inverse spheres...Great question!  We'll discuss that on another day, I say, fully intending to never broach the subject again, and hoping it doesn't come up until I have some time to research it more.

Univers-aaaaaaah!

This may be obvious but "universe" is an abstraction.  (You have to spell it out for nine and ten year-olds).  It's not a concrete, particular thing, like Sokrates, New York, or the planet Jupiter.  It is a first-level concept with direct referents in reality, because everything is a referent.  An example of a first-level concept would be "tree."  You can point to an oak in your yard and say, "that's a tree."  The abstraction, tree, includes all trees that have ever existed, presently exist and will ever exist.  Every tree that you come across is a referent.  But with the universe, every existent is a referent, and not just all existents that exist now, but everything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist are all conceptual referents.  (Pipe up, epistemologists, if I'm way off base on this).

The universe cannot be pictured in the mind--at least I don't know how you would do it.   For example, I can picture galaxies and other large objects.   If you were to write about trees, you might form an image of a tree in your head.  At this moment you might be picturing a large, slender pine, wind-swept cypress, a laden grapefruit, a towering redwood, or even combinations of parts and attributes of different trees.  My point is that it is the normal function of your mind to call up images of the things on which you are focusing, a tree, a car, a man, etc.  The universe however is different because it's the only first level concept I can think of at the moment for which it's impossible to call up a valid image.  Even high abstractions like honesty can be reduced to concrete honest activity, which can be mentally pictured. When I write "universe" your subconscious may have fed you an image, which is part of its normal processing, but there is no way that you could have formed an image of the universe.  You have seen many trees in your lifetime.  You have not--I guarantee it--ever seen the universe as a whole.  The universe can only be imagined from the inside because there is no outside.  This is not even a matter of size.  We have no problem picturing enormous structures like galaxies, swirling saucers of bright cloud with an intensely white center, masses of stars clustered in a vast circular formation against a black background. Because of our unique abilities to hierarchically order and reduce information we can imagine almost anything, from nano-machinery to Dyson spheres, from the breadth of a hair to the giant distances between star systems.  By fully grasping a meter we can, with little effort, grasp a kilometer.  We can comprehend thousands of kilometers, millions of miles, light-years to the nearest star.  But we cannot picture the universe as a whole because we can only be inside it.

The Roman poet, Lucretius, in his work, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) reflected the materialism of Democritus and Epicurus, and offered a simple but influential picture of an infinite universe.  His argument against those who claim the universe is limited amounts to this: What happens when you throw a spear beyond the outer edge of the universe?  "... 'Twill come to pass / That nowhere can a world's-end be, and that / The chance for further flight prolongs forever / The flight itself."  (De Rerum Natura, Titus Lucretius Carus, Tr. William Ellery Leonard.)  Lucretius concluded that the universe is infinite because wherever you extend the edge of the universe to accommodate the spear's path he will always be able to ask what happens when the spear hits the edge?  The problem with this argument is that the premises presuppose the conclusion.  Lucretius has already established an edge and an "outside" of the universe in his premises, but since there can be no edge or an "outside" his argument disintegrates.

Kids:  What happens to the thrown spear then?  Does it curve around and strike me in the back?  Doesn't inside the universe imply an outside?  So, is Lucretius his middle name?  Rerum is a funny word, isn't it?  Dyson?  Is that the vacuum guy?  What's he doing with spheres?

Words

Finished another chapter, ~1500 words out so far tonight, and I'm feeling pretty good about it.  And it's only 10.  The night's young!

Stuff in the mail

I finally sent out a cover, synopsis and first three chapters of a YA novel to Andrea Brown Lit. I also got a fantasy short in the mail to F&SF. Unlike a lot of stuff I've written lately it seemed like something they might like.

Harry Cover art

Here's an article about Mary GrandPre, the artist for the American (Scholastic) editions of the Harry Potters. (from CNN Entertainment section). She's already read book 6, but the image shown as the cover doesn't give anything away.  If you haven't guessed, I'm one of those wackos who'll be at Barnes and Noble at midnight for Halfblood Prince, just like I was for the Order of the Phoenix--with my son and daughter dressed up like Harry and Hermione.

A couple new sketches and a watercolor

I sketched and painted a few pieces last weekend.  One that turned out particularly well is what I think is a cool cover concept for one of my completed novels, a 120k word YA fantasy (looking for an agent for this and another).  I'll be adding a couple new pics to the my sketching and painting section.

A bit more supernatural

I threw this into a comment, but might as well make it a post.

Here I am, a fantasy writer, nit picking over the word.  I write about people using magic, weird things happening, entities with the power of gods, etc.  Blogging brings out the extreme Aristotelian in me.  (As does arguing with my kids).  I would say that Aristotle would say that there's nothing outside nature.  If you witnessed something unexplainable, when, if or however you end up explaining it, it would still have to be within nature.  Also, Ari would probably concede that there are proper uses of the word, supernatural, just as there are proper mathematical uses of the word, infinity, even though he put a lot of effort into proving that there's no such thing as an actual infinity.