Infinite Allways

Time carries him as the river carries
A leaf in the downstream water.
No matter. The enchanted one insists
And shapes God with delicate geometry.
Since his illness, since his birth,
He goes on constructing God with the word.
The mightiest love was granted him
Love that does not expect to be loved.

-Jose Luis Borges writing about Baruch Spinoza

How did he do it? Mired in the nonsensical medieval philosophy of a pre-scientific age, starting with inane talk of “substances” and “essences”, yet somehow Spinoza ended up with a bold and illuminating way to view the world, one rarely approached by other philosophers even centuries later.

The Divine Machine

Most immediately stunning is his concept of God. Spinoza has no “invisible man in the sky”; rather he imagines that the mind of God encompasses the entire universe, that God is the universe. The way Spinoza talks about God reminds me of quotes from Einstein:

Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.

In fact, Spinoza’s spirituality was so wonderfully commingled with his experience of mathematics and natural law that he was persecuted as an atheist. This is good news: here is no navel-gazing monk, but someone who wants to really examine the world and find out how best we should live in it.

From one miracle to another: Spinoza is a proud member an absurdly small club of philosophers who refuse to defend the absurdity of free will. Spinoza (rightly) didn’t believe in any kind of magical soul, and realized that mankind is in no way exempt from the laws of cause and effect.

Men believe themselves to be free because they are conscious of their own actions and are ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.

People don’t like being told that mind is matter. In fact, that seventeenth-century quote from Spinoza is an accurate summary of the large sections of “Godel, Escher, Bach” devoted to dispelling the idea of free will (a debunking achieved primarily by demonstrating the wonder, beauty, and sheer plausibility of a deterministic universe). Point is, the argument for determinism has been crystal-clear for 350 years but nobody wants to listen. They’re convinced that taking away free will would mean a mechanistic life devoid of choice, morality, wonder, and meaning. (Spoiler alert: They couldn’t be more wrong if they tried.)

Love is Understanding

You may have be wondering why this post is sprinkled with screenshots from “The Tree of Life”. The film’s been growing on me ever since I first saw it; it presents a view of the universe which is beautiful, spiritual and loving, yet still fundamentally honest. “The only way to be happy is to love,” says Grace at one point in the film, “Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light.”

At first, the passionately emotional, spiritual life proposed by The Tree of Life doesn’t seem to fit with the detatched empirical derivations of the other influential voices in my philosophy: people like Feynman, Sagan, Blow, and Hofstadter.

That’s when Spinoza works another miracle. The Tree of Life (and Only Revolutions, and arguably Flower, and all those wonderful Disney songs) teach that a happy life comes from loving. All those scientist-philosophers I just mentioned teach that an interesting life comes from understanding. Spinoza teaches that love is understanding, and understanding is love.

If you’re anything like most the students in my Modern Philosophy class, your reaction is something along the lines of, “Lolwut?”

Here: Imagine someone that you love deeply. (Failing that, imagine a beloved book or etc.) Recall when you first encountered this person (or object, or whatever). Surely you felt drawn to them: you needed to know them, be with them, learn their subtle intricacies and unique movements. At first, the object of your affections was a relative stranger. Perhaps you were instantly enamored with them, perhaps they slowly grew on you, but in either case you couldn’t love them deeply because you didn’t really know them. Over the course of the relationship that ensued, you came to understand them. You discovered puzzling flaws and encountered unexpected beauty. Only then did you begin to really love the real person in front of you (instead of your shallow, imagined model of them). Clearly, love and understanding grow hand in hand.

That shows how love requires understanding to grow. Now the other way around: Conjure something you now love that you first learned about in school. Consider a scientific principle or a classic literary work. At first, it may have been arduous to obtain the colorless knowledge involved: manipulating Maxwell’s Equations requires learning arcane vector math, and reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet requires learning archaic Middle English. In time, though, the application of memorized knowledge will lead the path to true understanding, and understanding will lead the path to love. With understanding, a soliloquy is transformed from dead, pretentious-sounding nonsense into a passionate, living expression of powerful ideas. A morass of cross-products and vector fields is revealed as the underlying order of the cosmos, responsible for the creation of light and progenitor of the chemistry of life.

The upshot of all this? In a deterministic universe like ours, causality rules supreme. Even the most unexpected happenings are triggered by delicate causes waiting to be discovered. By teaching us to seek and accept the rules that govern our world, Spinoza points the way to a life of passionate understanding.

Here are two reactions to misfortune: “If only I hadn’t left my bike outside overnight, it wouldn’t have been stolen!” is considered a reasonable response, while “If only my bike could transform into a lion, nobody could have taken it!” is an utterly surreal reaction. But in a deterministic universe, neither alternative was possible. Understand why it could not have happened any other way: you will learn from the experience, and the pain of misfortune will diminish. In his own words:

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

Similarly, Spinoza says that we should not react to something lovely by remaining in ignorance. As any scientist will tell you, the idea that knowledge somehow diminishes wonder and beauty is a complete myth. Learning more will only illuminate the full wonder and depth of the objects of our joy.

The Value of Truth

Of the various scenarios I described above, Spinoza would probably find the description of Maxwell’s Equations most intriguing. (Of course, no offense to the Bard!) For Spinoza, man’s highest good was “the intellectual love of God”: an awareness, understanding, and passionate engagement with the beauty of the universe.

Feynman describes this feeling somewhat:

…I want to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run “behind the scenes” by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is.

Einstein often expressed a similar sentiment:

If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

“But wait,” you may be asking, “what makes this entire thing worth believing? No free will? No gods? No objective morality or purpose? No soul? And all I get in return is a kind of hakuna-matata stoicism and an impersonal science-as-spirituality? No thanks.”

It’s true; the world of empirical experience is not explicitly designed to satisfy human spiritual expectations. So, why embrace the confusing, perhaps tragic reality? Why not simply accept the reassuring fable?

Personally, I have a strong conviction that probable truth is always preferable to beliefs which are comforting but unlikely. But, If you press me, you’ll soon find that in fact I have no rational explanation for that conviction. It’s just a feeling.

In the end, the best I can offer is an aesthetic argument: Reality, I believe, will always be more subtle, complex, and beautiful than any fantasy. Again, just a feeling, but perhaps there’s some substance to it. Take it from Shakespeare:

“O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!” utters Horatio, to which Hamlet responds:

…And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Finally, I’d like to end this post with a clip from “The Tree of Life” as well as a quote from Spinoza’s Ethics. Here they are:

In proportion as the mind rejoices more in this divine love or blessedness, so does it the more understand.

You’ve heard of “blood diamonds”, gems mined in african warzones and sold to western insurers to finance insurgent groups. But here’s what you DIDN’T KNOW:

WHENEVER you use elements at or above atomic number 26, you’re using elements that originated in THE MOST VIOLENT EVENTS OF THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE.

That’s right: deadly supernova explosions are responsible for 100 PERCENT of the US supply of elements like Copper, Silver, Tin, Mercury, Gold, Lead, and Uranium were produced in explosions of cancer-inducing X-Ray radiation, explosions trillions of times more intense than the atomic bombs detonated in World War Two!

STOP blood elements: don’t support elements with atomic numbers greater than that of iron, and only use carbon and oxygen from planetary nebulae and certified-low-mass stars.

“What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.” -Hamlet

I don’t want to live life to be happy. Of course I enjoy the comfortable, pleasing life that I do lead. But I don’t want to live in order to be happy. I don’t want to tell myself lies to cultivate a state of blissful ignorance. I don’t want to retreat into escapism and fantasy. The purpose of life is not “to be entertained”.

I don’t want to do frivolous things. I don’t want to read frivolous things, or spend time with frivolous people, or play frivolous games, or think frivolous thoughts. I want my life to be interesting! I want the classes I take to be mind-expanding, the friends I choose to be eye-opening, the books I read to be worldwrecking. I want to live a life overflowing with truth, and love, and understanding.

Obvious, right? Who doesn’t want to live a life of meaning and significance?

Well, apparently… everyone. Even me. Every day, I waste hours just being thoughtless. Playing repetitive, juvenile videogames instead of seeking out something revolutionary. Gobbling irrelevant news stories online instead of digesting a book full of profound new perspectives. Rambling on in thoughtless conversation instead of tuning in to far more significant themes. Even, at times, maintaining entire relationships despite their shallow, meaningless nature. These things aren’t important. They aren’t good. They aren’t even fun. But somehow, I do them anyways.

When I wake up into clarity, and look back on all this apathetic thoughtlessness, it kills me. “Why?!” I ask, “I don’t want this!” And yet, through clicks, through moans, through empty yawns, the void of apathy remains. “I don’t know,” it weakly responds, “I don’t know.”

“Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything.” -The Diamond Age

The following poem was provided by Google Audio Transcribe Beta, to the tune of Andrew Ryan’s speech at the beginning of Bioshock:

Bhai.

I’d like to ask you a question.

Is a man of the title of the sweat of his walkman?

“NO,” system admnin Washington launched board almost as though that in the Vatican teaching football steve gaw (…?!??)

“NAO,” systematic Moscow, “It belongs to everyone.”

My rejected through… instead, actual something… panchos youth… actuals…

RAPTORS

The biggest action series of all time returns!  The latest entry in the Call of Duty saga will take you to conflicts in universities across the globe, exploring a tangled web of symbolism, character, and metanarrative in a Pynchonesque odyssey that questions cultural assumptions about violence and masculinity while re-examining the very nature of the interactive medium!

An All-New, Epic Single-Player Campaign

America is under attack.  Not from terrorists or rouge powers, but from a nauseating feeling of emptiness and nihilism pervading modern, post-9/11 society.  In the latest blockbuster entry in the Call of Duty series, fight as an undercover agent to recontextualize our relationship to contemporary narratives and untangle confusion between the signifier and the signified.

But are you really black ops mercenary John Delilo, fighting across decaying suburban Americana, through dreamlike Tokyo streets, and into the war-torn landscapes of the mind?  Or are you merely Tom Short, an eleven-year old gamer who spends hours hurling racial and sexual slurs into xbox LIVE multiplayer while his distant parents struggle to find meaning in their shallow marriage?

Revamped Gameplay:

Enjoy the same fast-paced, adrenaline-pumping gameplay, now with an all-new suite of mechanics!  Health is now measured in two ways: your health bar regenerates after three seconds behind cover, while your mental health bar permanently crashes to zero  as soon as the impersonal steel of your trigger first ends a human life.  Pressing a secret combination of three buttons in sequence will instantly transform your avatar into a cockroach for the duration of the level!  And best of all, Call of Duty’s celebrated visceral combat is now even more intense thanks to a complete graphics overhaul and the inclusion of fully-deconstructible environments.

Innovative Multiplayer Features:

-Traverse a procedurally-generated, ever-shifting infinite labyrinth where the only sound is gunfire echoing in the blackness.  There’s no chest-high cover in this new map… House of Bullets.

-Revisit all the most intellectually problematic CoD levels, remade in HD!  The year is 2013, the place is Moscow International Airport.  Play an attractive japanese terrorist who is slowly noticing small, peculiar changes in the unfolding civilian massacre around her.  Re-experience the infamous “No Russian” level of Modern Warfare 2 as… 2Q13.

-An infinite library of games consoles is filled with an infinite number of random DVDs.  Will you find the Index of Indicies?  Or will you see only the Red Ring of Death in… The Gamestop of Babel.

-Nazi Zombies mode returns!  Fight off demonic hordes representing consumerism’s mindless lust for repetitive sequels and video violence, all the while contemplating the banality of evil as revealed by audio logs from the original Stanford Prison experiments.

-Take advantage of an all-new class-based progression system!  …Just make sure that it’s not taking advantage of you.  Killstreaks earn you points that give you an addicting yet meaningless imitation of true satisfaction, while persistent XP bonuses and and the microtransaction-based in-game market will help you grab exclusive unlocks that reveal the psychological mechanisms that drive unhealthy compulsion, the inherently unstable state of capitalism and the dehumanizing nature of arbitrary, abstract systems of value.

On November 13, prepare for the explosive next entry in the world’s biggest videogame franchise…

Call of Duty: Postmodern Warfare

(This post is the last entry in a series about the idea of entropy in the books of Mark Z Danielewski)

A Dream of Two Wonders

On all scales, Only Revolutions is a dance of dualities.  It is a love story between Hailey & Sam, two kids who are “allways sixteen”.  Only Revolutions is two symmetrical stories in one 360 page novel: each ends where the other begins, and the alternating chapters of Sam & Hailey meet in the middle before diverging again by the end.  In this way, and in many others, Only Revolutions is the inverse of House of Leaves (a tome built to resemble a labyrinth of dead-ends, forking paths, and disorienting passages). I’ll name a few examples; learning the inverted tone of Only Revolutions is important to understanding the book’s take on entropy.

Most immediately, House of Leaves is a horror novel full of deception and multiple layers of interpretation, whereas Only Revolutions is the earnestly- and directly-told love story of Sam & Hailey.

While House of Leaves is a messy collage of rambling prose and cross-referenced footnotes, Only Revolutions is written in a tightly constrained poetical form.

HoL happens almost entirely inside a House, but Only Revolutions is allways on the move: it’s a road novel, where Hailey & Sam tear down highways across the U.S. from St. Louis and New Orleans.

The cast of “The Navidson Record” is essentially a family; their story is a private, intimate one.  Conversely, Only Revolutions’ ever-changing cast of characters and live through a wide range of historical events.

And while House of Leaves portrays entropy as the dark enemy of life, Only Revolutions recognizes what Schrodinger knew: that both growth and decay are fueled by the same process.

Flame of Passion, Fire of War

Let’s take a moment to expand that last point.  In most fiction, entropy is a force of death and deterioration.  But the flow and transformation of energy through entropy also powers most of the change in the universe, including the chemical processes necessary for life and mind.  Only Revolutions sees the life/death contrast as a false duality: both are change, and change is good.

A good example of this can be found in the exact center of the book (pages 180-181).  While Sam & Hailey are experiencing the peak of their creative and youthful love, the historical dates in the margins refer to the years 1943 (World War Two in full swing) and 1984 (think George Orwell), two stories of horrific war, misery, and destruction. Where other books would see a jarring contrast, Only Revolutions sees unity in change.

In other parts of the book, too, events of importance are linked to times of great change (both good and bad) in US history.  Consider: Sam’s story ends (and Hailey’s begins) on November 22, 1963.  This is the date of JFK’s assassination, and is only a month after the Cuban Missile Crisis.  In the same year, The Beatles were first becoming international superstars and Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech.  (This correlation between change for Hailey & Sam and change for America is further bolstered by the fact that Sam & Hailey are often mentioned in the text as “US”, always in all-caps, a clear allusion to our nation’s nickname.)

But I believe that Hailey & Sam are more than just correlated with times of change. Rather, they are the change.

On to Lovely Ruins

Just like the House, Hailey & Sam can be understood as personifications of entropy.  (“Entropomorphism”, if you will.)  But while the House represented only the terror of inevitable death, Sam & Hailey represent a more balanced mix of emotions all associated with change.  Change can be destructive, of course: on page 349, in a moment of fury on a frozen winter wasteland, Sam declares his worldwrecking ambitions:

I won’t forgive.  Forfend. Fortake
I forsake it all with pogroms.
Heave of blade, grenade, uranium &
troubling velocities.  Mortar rounds, ground zero.
By me all levees will break.  All silos heave.

Later on the same page, Sam moves from the destruction of war and the decay of infrastructure to clear allusions to the Heat Death of the universe:

A compass of travels never
beyond range of my wrath.  Even equators
will crisp.  Change our directions.  Until Saturn,
Uranus, fedup, will wobble loose and go.
 Sorrow’s Five Horizons goes too with a swing.
Milkyway, singularity, every universe sent wandering. 

And yet, despite such whirlwind rage, Hailey & Sam are also full of youthful life and impossibly passionate love.  This is extremely clear in all of Only Revolutions:  each of the pair revolves around the other, happily outracing all others on foot or in carefree car rides, often pulling over spontaneously to make love by roadside edens of rich and verdant life.

Regardless of their moods’ alternating moral charges, Sam & Hailey are overflowing with the self-propelling energy of change and dynamism.  They embrace change, knowing and accepting that the price of living with passionate attachment to the world is having to watch the world fall apart.  In fact, “Only Revolutions” is an anagram for “To Love Only Ruins”, which itself refers to two things: it means both “the practice of loving solely destroyed things” and also “the act of loving will only cause decay and lead to ruin”.

Here’s to Keeping it Summer 

If the freedom and spontaneity of change is universally virtuous in the ethics of Only Revolutions, then stagnation and timelessness are the villains.  The darkest moments in Only Revolutions happen when Sam & Hailey fear becoming tied down in any way: if their car breaks down, if they are forced to settle and get jobs in the city, if there is a literal noose around their necks.

Perhaps most of all, each secretly fears that commitment to the other will steal their freedom.  At the beginning of the book, Sam and Hailey are warned to “never fall” (in love) and “never get stung” (think pangs of longing as well as the sexual connotation), respectively.  On page 20, marriage is described as “Liberty’s end”, a lagoon of stagnant existence which leads to “Love’s undoing”.

…And here’s where things get complicated.

Winter Wins

Let’s go back to an entropy metaphor from an earlier post.  The usable energy in the universe is like water in a high-altitude lake, and entropy is like a river that drains that water downhill.  The turbulence and dynamism of that river is what Only Revolutions celebrates. (This includes the proliferation of life, which takes the form of whirlpools and eddies on the river—local, temporary reversals of entropy’s dominant flow.)  But although the turbulence is good, the river will eventually run dry when the lake is fully drained, and all the water will lie flat and stagnant in the sea.  The terror of entropy returns: change itself leads inevitably to the cessation of change.

Truth is in Motion

It’s still a rotten deal, in the end: even after passionately embracing entropy’s mandate of turbulent change, entropy defeats itself by leading eventually to the death of a static universe.

And here is where the core theme of Only Revolutions becomes involved: the revolving pages, the turns of phrase, the symmetrical stories, the rotation of rubber on road, the cycle of seasons, the revolution of stars and worlds in their stately gravitational dance.  They represent the kind of world we wish we could have: always in motion, but never winding down.  Dynamic and yet eternal.  Perpetual motion: the best of both worlds.

Of course, Mark Z. Danielewski is no liar.  He paints for us the dream of passionate eternal youth, but not without reminding us that it is a comforting illusion.  In OR, as in reality, even the surest cycles do wind down eventually.  ”The CREEP” is a recurring character who represents this inevitability (think “the creep of decay” or “the minutes crept by”), carrying a noose with which to forever tie up Sam & Hailey.  Other reminders abound: their supply of life-renewing honey dwindles lower throughout the book.  And each of the pair has a “leftwrist twist” —a watch— which drops precipitously in value (from “leftwrist twist of Diamond” to “leftwrist twist of Shit”) as moments flee irredeemably into the past.

The tragic beauty of Only Revolutions is that it’s almost perfect.  The story of Sam & Hailey is passionate, universal, and beautiful.  Two kids, allways sixteen, allways wracked with ruin, allways light with love.  Allways reborn.  Until someday soon, when all of a sudden they aren’t.

This post is part of a series about the idea of entropy in Only Revolutions and House of Leaves.

It seems that House of Leaves hit the nail on the head with its characterization of entropy.  Only Revolutions promises to present the flipside of any idea in HoL, but is there really any other way to view entropy?  Even the most secular of moral relativists will point to entropy as the ultimate freezing death, the one unambiguous source of corruption and evil in the universe.

In fact, there is a silver lining on the cloud of Heat Death.  In order to understand the subtle perspective of Only Revolutions, it is helpful to know Erwin Schrodinger’s idea of defining life through entropy.

In addition to working out much of quantum mechanics, the famous physicist also wrote a very short book called “What is Life?”.  Much of the novel’s specific speculations have been rendered obsolete by advances in biochemistry, but his core insight is perfectly correct.

First, Schrodinger makes a basic observation about the definition of life: ”What is the characteristic feature of life?  When is a piece of matter said to be alive?  When it goes on ‘doing something’, moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, for much longer than we would expect inanimate matter to ‘keep going’ under similar circumstances.”  When an inorganic system is isolated from external events, it very quickly comes to a standstill: water flows downhill, electric potentials equalize, chemical reactions occur, and the entire system soon approaches the final state of maximum entropy.

“It is by avoiding that rapid decay into the inert state of equilibrium that an organism appears so enigmatic,” Schrodinger asserts.  But how?  The matter of a living thing is just as subject to the laws of thermodynamics as the matter of any inert body, so what’s special about life that enables it to escape the requisite decay?

In order to avoid the ever-encroaching state of maximum entropy (death), life must “succeed in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive”.  To do this, life feeds upon highly-ordered, low-entropy energy. (For humans, this means the complex chemicals in food.)  Life, then, is an engine of entropy: it steals order from the universe and ejects chaos in order to climb higher away from equilibrium.

Life seems a contradictory process: its metabolism is governed by entropic processes, but it exists to maintain order by expelling entropy.  If the increasing chaos of the universe is imagined as a river flowing to equilibrium at sea level, then every living thing is an eddy in that river.  Just as an eddy seems to travel impossibly upstream, life seems to impossibly evade the corrupting influence of entropy.  But just as an eddy is powered by (and contributes to) the general downward motion of the stream, life’s concentrated order comes at the cost of sending the overall universe faster on its descent toward Heat Death .

As we will see in my next post, it is this idea of the co-dependency of life upon death that permeates Only Revolutions.

This post is the third in a series on the idea of entropy in MZD’s novels.  In this post, I’ll describe entropy’s presence in “House of Leaves”.

As time unfolds, the net entropy of the universe will increase to a grim maximum.  Within a few hundred trillion years, all star formation will cease.  Not long after, all stellar remnants will have cooled to a bare few degrees above absolute zero.  Planets will wander from their orbits to drift dead through space, where most will be consumed by supermassive black holes.  In time, even these prowling singularities will “evaporate”, radiating away their stores of mass, charge, and energy.  No process can escape this stagnation and decay; no life could survive this complete petrification of all movement.  As the universe expands more and more rapidly, even the barest photon of light will become rare.  This frozen state of ultimate equilibrium is known as the “Heat Death” of the universe.  

This portrayal of entropy-as-death is a familiar and accurate one.  In particular, many science-fiction tales feature ancient-evil, far-advanced races that are little more than thinly veiled metaphors for the heat death of the universe. (The Monoliths of Arthur C. Clarke’s novels are the most famous example of this trope. The Reapers of Mass Effect 3 are a particularly recent incarnation, and similar antagonists have appeared in books by Stephen Baxter and Alistair Reynolds.)

House of Leaves does a particularly excellent job portraying the terrible nature of entropy.  Observe how the interior of the House, as described “from as objective a point of view as possible” on page 370, perfectly echoes my earlier description of the far-future universe:

No light.
No humidity.
No air movement.
Temperature remains at 32 degrees F. (imagine substituting “0 degrees K”)
No sounds.
Walls are uniformly black. (“skies” instead of “walls”)
Size and depth vary enormously. (consider the accelerating expansion of the universe)
The place will purge itself of all things.
No object has ever been found there.
There is no dust.

The next ten pages reinforce this metaphor, revealing that samples of materiel chipped from the walls of the House by Will Navidson “form a timeline extending back before the birth of even the solar system”.

In addition to maintaining the analogy between the House and the void of space, the authors don’t shy away from referencing those primitive, sci-fi entropy-personifications I mentioned earlier.  ”The Monolith in 2001 seems the most appropriate cinematic analog [to the Hallway],” asserts Zampano on page 60; A Space Odyssey is also referenced on pages 363 and 477.

Like any horror novel, House of Leaves extracts fear from images of darkness, death, and creeping decay.  On all levels, the forces of entropy are at work: on the loosening sanity of Johnny Truant and Zampanò, on the violent deaths of Lude, Jed, and Holloway, on Will and Karen’s deteriorating marriage.

 
Entropy in House of Leaves is the ultimate terror, an inevitable, growling force of death.  At the end of the song “Control” by MZD’s sister, the author can be heard saying the following:

“At the end of it all lies of course the final phenomenon of deterioration: entropy.  Which is a predictable deterioration when the creative energy ceases: everything has to fall apart.”

This is Part 2 of a series of posts about how Only Revolutions and House of Leaves relate to the concept of entropy.  In this post, I hope to lay down a decent explanation for anyone unfamiliar with the phenomenon.  To hear a much deeper, better explanation of entropy and how it relates to time, I heartily recommend Feynman’s wonderful hour-long talk “The Distinction of Past and Future”.  But if you would prefer a briefer explanation and are willing to take my word for things instead of understanding them in depth, the explanation below will suffice for a discussion of House of Leaves and Only Revolutions.

Like the core ideas of many profound ideas in physics, the definition of entropy is simple to relate.  Namely, Entropy is a measure of how evenly energy is distributed in a system.  A cold room containing a hot object has low entropy because energy is concentrated in the hot object.  As the object cools, however, the temperature of all points in the room will even out and approach equilibrium; entropy increases.

Heat naturally spreads out and radiates away.  Furthermore, whenever energy changes form, some energy becomes waste heat.  Like water in a dam pushing turbines to produce electricity, concentrated energy can be used to do work.  However, washed-out waste heat cannot be used for anything.  Since some energy will be lost every time energy changes form, the total amount of entropy in the universe will always increase.

The tendency for energy to seek equilibrium is expressed absolutely everywhere: hot objects radiate heat to their surroundings and cool to room temperature, water flows downhill to a lower-potential-energy state, the highly organized proteins in milk fall into lower-energy “denatured” states and create yogurt.  Whenever energy changes form, some energy becomes waste heat.  This waste heat decreases the net order (and increases the net entropy) of the universe. No matter how efficient the conversion, some energy will be lost in every transaction, and the total amount of entropy (disorder) will increase.

Interestingly, entropy is not an intrinsic law of the universe in the same way as, say, the inverse square law of the forces of gravity and electricity.  Imagine a room full of air.  Individual collisions between particles in an ideal gas are perfectly reversible: they lose no energy, so the entire process can be turned around (by reversing the direction of every particle) and played backwards.  But even though each individual reaction is reversible, a great many reactions will always tend toward equilibrium.  It is extremely likely that, in a room with hot air on one side and cold air on the other, the two sides will mingle and become lukewarm.  It is extremely unlikely that, once mixed, the hot and cold atoms will spontaneously re-segregate themselves.

All the fundamental equations of physics are reversible: flip the velocities and electrical charges, and everything runs backwards.  The statistical phenomenon of entropy is essentially the only possible way to tell the difference between the past and the future.  Only entropy allows us to make sense of the universe using cause and effect.  Entropy drives all irreversible change in the universe, and change is the only way we can discern the passage of time.  For all practical purposes, then, entropy is time.

Only Revolutions.  This second novel from the author of House of Leaves is the flipside of his debut work.  Where House of Leaves is a creeping horror story told through the distorting lenses of several authors and bundled together in a labyrinthe mess of prose, Only Revolutions is a direct and earnest love story told through a tightly bound poetic form.  While House of Leaves takes place entirely in the intimate, personal darkness of a House, Only Revolutions is a rip-roaring road novel that dances through 200 years of U.S. history.  Most importantly, while House of Leaves is built on a terrifying maze of infinitely branching space, Only Revolutions circles around a loop of eternally recurring time.

When I first read Only Revolutions, simply seeing such an unusual literary feat was impressive enough that I enjoyed the book.  But although I enjoyed the flowing poetic style and delighted in the thematic inversions of Only Revolutions, I did not understand the book at all when I first read it two years ago.

I’m not claiming to have achieved MZD-enlightenment: I don’t have a fully satisfying understanding (nor even a fully competent understanding) of either House of Leaves or Only Revolutions.  But having re-read Only Revolutions, I feel confident at least declaring this: far more interesting than many of the superficial differences between House of Leaves and Only Revolutions are the deep commonalities between the two books.

If you know me, you know that entropy is likely to get involved at some point in any conversation.  But this time I’m not reading anything extravagant into the text: Only Revolutions and House of Leaves together paint a unique portrait of the mysterious statistical force that drives change in the universe.

Over the next few days, look forward to four more posts examining this subject.  It’s been a pleasure writing them, and I hope you’ll find them interesting.

Ever heard this song?  Unlike “Neutron Star Collision”, I actually really like this one.  Phoenix’s “Love Like A Sunset” doesn’t have many words; just several minutes of intense build-up followed by two gigantic moments of musical resolution, with a nice indie song as an epilogue.

Y’all are probably already familiar with my love of a message’s form complementing its content, and this song does it in a very cool way.  The song is a sunset: the buildup is sitting on a grassy hill, watching the sun go down, and the first explosive silence is the moment when the sun first touches the horizon.  The second buildup happens as the sun is partially occulted by the horizon; it’s the mounting anticipation for the second, more final denouement, when Sol’s last crescent of gold will slip from view.  The indie wind-down afterwards is the period of contemplative twilight that slowly embraces the sky in the next few minutes.

I’ve always felt like it would be really cool to play this song while watching an actual sunset.  But that raises an interesting question: would the timing line up?

 

In the song, the first drop happens at 3:09, and the second at 5:20.  That’s two minutes and eleven seconds of sun sitting on the horizon.

How long does the actual sun take to set?  Well, my astrophysics book assures me that the Sun is 1391,000,000 meters in diameter, and 149,597,000,000 meters distant from Terra.  We can use that to figure out how big the sun is in the sky: Using the approximation that Sin(x)=x for small angles, we can see that the Sun is Sin(x) = x = 1391,000,000 / 149,597,000,000 = 0.0092 radians across.  I don’t like radians for this problem, so make that 0.0092 * 180 / Pi = 0.533 degrees.

So, the sun is 0.53 degrees across in the sky.  How long will it take to set?  Well, the earth turns once a day, so that means the whole sky turns 360 degrees in 24 hours, right?  Turn those 24 hours into 86,400 seconds, and it’s easy to see that the sky moves at 360 / 86,400 = 0.0042 degrees per second.  0.533 degrees at a rate of 0.0042 degrees per second?  Just divide the first by the second, and that makes 128 seconds of sunset.

128 seconds is, of course, two minutes and eight seconds long.  That’s only three seconds off from the sunset in Phoenix’s song!

But wait!  Before you head off on a super-romantic sunset date, there’s a catch.  That 128 seconds is the absolute minimum time: a high-speed dying-of-the-light that can only be seen when the sun is directly on the celestial equator (therefore setting precisely due west), and when the sun sets directly downward instead of at a slant.  This minimum time will only happen during the autumnal and vernal equinoxes, while seen from the equator.  At all other times and places, the sun will take slightly longer to set.  From colorado springs, it’s impossible to get a two-minute, eleven-second-long sunset: even at the peak of summer, the sun sets at too much of a slant.

VERDICT: In order to have a decent shot at the perfect Phoenix-orchestrated sunset, you’d have to be at least within 30 degrees of the equator, and it might not be possible until you were officially in the tropics.

…In related news: I guess analyzing the astronomy-related titles of popular songs from a literal perspective is now a formal part of this tumblr.

Many of the videogames that have touched me most deeply share a certain design.  Almost all videogames take place in two- or three-dimensional virtual worlds, but among many of my favorites, that the virtual environment becomes more than a simple level design or art showcase.  In these games, spaces represent ideas.  In the simplest sense, the puzzles of Portal 2 are all designed to communicate an idea to the player about how portals can be used.  Braid takes it a step further: different puzzles showcase more than just the peculiar consequences of time-bending puzzle-platformer mechanics; they represent real-world experiences like forgiveness, regret, manipulation, sacrifice, and longing.  Korsakovia, Psychonauts, and Dear Esther all exhibit worlds that are the physical manifestation of different characters’ psychologies, while the various stages of Journey are designed around different feelings, arranged to echo the emotional path of a more ambiguous, metaphorical journey.

“Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP” has a similar goal in mind: according to its creators, the game “can be understood as a prog rock concept album you can hang out in”.  And what a concept it is.  I’m neither knowledgeable nor very enthusiastic about music, but even for me, the cornerstone of my time with the game was its soundtrack.  Everything is built around the music: the simple but tense quick-time battles, the amazing art of the mythical world, the strange mix of classic videogame quest with heavy Carl Jung influence with laid-back, let’s-jam hipster attitude.  And by the way, Sword and Sworcery’s pixel-art dreamscapes aren’t part of the increasingly recycled retro-indie-game trend (although the game has a loving affinity for an old-school Zelda feel); Sworcery’s landscapes are beautifully created, and every character is brought alive with expressive animations.

Although it will technically take you at least two weeks (perhaps even several months) to complete Sword and Sworcery, it isn’t actually a long game.  But that’s a good thing: by breaking its few-hour length into a handful of half-hour segments, Sworcery creates the feeling that it is a friendly place to visit, not a packaged, one-time-use-only experience to be consumed.

There’s not much actual “game” to this game, but that’s okay too.  In fact, it’s great: progressing in Sword and Sworcery doesn’t demand mastery of a system of mechanics; instead, it relies on the player tuning into their intuition about what to do. It’s a weird way to make a game, but it works: getting stuck just means you should revisit the game later with a new mindset, and a few moments of intuitive realization can feel downright magical.

Have you ever wished that you could walk around in a prog-rock album?  Or longed for a Zelda game that was 10 times shorter but 10 times more magic?  Maybe you’ve hoped to follow an ursine dream-guide through a pixelated forest in a mythical realm?  Or wanted to meditate under a rainbow to gain access to the Whirling Infinite?

…Me neither, but Sword and Sworcery EP is a great game regardless.

0.018 meters is the tip of my nose.

0.18 meters is a book held to read.

1.8 meters is my height from head to toe.

18 meters is how far I walk in the hall.

180 meters from my dorm to my class.

1800 meters to the restaurants downtown.

18,000 meters to the top of Pike’s Peak.

180,000 meters to Tandena in Fort Collins.

1,800,000 meters to Sacramento, if you curve with the roads.

18,000,000 meters is as far away you can possibly get from anywhere on earth.

180,000,000 meters is not quite halfway to the Moon.

1,800,000,000 meters is a photon’s six-second flight.

18,000,000,000 meters is a minute of light.

180,000,000,000 meters to the orb of the sun.

1,800,000,000,000 gets you Saturn’s golden disk of icy stardust.

18,000,000,000,000 meters to Voyager’s golden disk of music and hope.

180,000,000,000,000 meters to some sparse icy rocks.

1,800,000,000,000,000 meters to some dull snowy stones.

18,000,000,000,000,000 meters is a quarter to Sirius, halfway to Proxima.

180,000,000,000,000,000 meters, and radio messages still can be heard.

Much far past that are the glittering stars, and much far past that there is nothing to see, save small islands of light in the slow-stretching dark.