What Happened to Her Husband? -- Pylon and The Robots of Dawn

(Note: there are some minor spoilers for these two books in this post.)

William Faulkner has only two degrees of separation from Star Wars. Faulkner worked on the screenplay for The Big Sleep, which was also worked on by Leigh Brackett. And Leigh Brackett wrote the first version of the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. So -- if you think of Star Wars as the whole series of movies, Faulkner is only two degrees of separation away from Star Wars.

Depending on who you talk to, this is either a compliment or an insult to either Faulkner or Star Wars.

So maybe it's not such a leap to include my reactions to a novel by Faulkner, who is known largely for his stream-of-consciousness style and sweeping Southern historical dramas, with my reactions to a novel by science fiction legend Isaac Asimov.

But Faulkner's book is only a half step away from science fiction, anyway. Faulkner's book Pylon must -- I really can't say for sure -- be among the first novels by a "serious literary" author to deal with flying airplanes -- let alone racing them!

In fact, I was about to call this blog post "High-Speed Wrath," because Faulkner's novel Pylon reminds me of The Grapes of Wrath, except that unlike the Joads, the main characters of this book are a traveling group of people who perform at airshows. But the time period is similar: the Depression era. And the theme of travelling workers is very much the same.

But Pylon was written in 1935, four years before The Grapes of Wrath. And Faulkner has an incredibly unique vision of a specific type of itinerant worker. Faulkner's world carries with it something of the cosmopolitan. Even these traveling aviators, living from hand to mouth -- if they even get that much to live by! --, sleeping outdoors, or under the wings of their plane, if the weather's really bad, have an element of the cosmopolitan to them.

There are five characters in the group of traveling aviators. Roger Shumann, who races the "family's" airplane; Jack, who performs parachute jumps at airshows; Jiggs, the airplane mechanic; "the woman," who seems to go nameless; and "the boy," whose name is eventually revealed to be Jack Shumann.

Why does the boy have the first name of the parachute jumper and the last name of the aviator? Easy -- because nobody knows which of the two is actually the boy's father! Both Shumann and Jack sleep with the woman. She got pregnant but didn't know who made her pregnant. So Shumann and Jack flipped a coin. Shumann won the coin toss. So he got to marry the woman. But both men still sleep with the woman.

The "family" also includes the mechanic, Jiggs, who doesn't seem to have much to do with the sexual relations of the group. Jiggs is, apparently, an alcoholic. But he's doing his best to quit with the booze.

The "family" has all come to Faulkner's fictional New Orleans, a town called New Valois. A new airport has been opened up in New Valois. The airport's ceremonies include a big airshow. So the "family" has come to perform in the airshow. The ceremonies are concurrent with Mardi Gras, which New Valois, like New Orleans, celebrates with days-long festivities.

The story begins with Jiggs at a shoemaker's shop in New Valois. He's trying to drive a bargain for a new pair of boots. His boots are totally wrecked. The boots will end up costing him $22.50. He doesn't have the money now, but he promises to come back for the boots in the afternoon, when he has the money. The shoemaker holds the boots for him.

So Jiggs takes the bus up to the airport, which is on the outskirts of New Valois. At the airport, Jiggs meets up with the rest of the family. But a newspaper reporter, who also goes nameless, has seemed to latch onto the family. He takes the job of taking care of the little boy while the rest of the family is running around, doing things like taking care of the plane, racing the plane, or jumping out of a different plane.

Shumann is flying an old model airplane. Three years previous, this was one of the newest models. But airplane models are constantly changing. And now Shumann's model is basically obsolete.

Nevertheless, Shumann, who hadn't expected even to place in the race he was competing in, actually gets second place! This raises hopes for the family. They now get prize money, which they expect will pay for a hotel and food for a little while. So now they won't have to sleep outside.

But it turns out that they don't get to receive their prize money for the flight until the next day. So they're depending on the money Jack is going to make by parachute-jumping. He gets $25 for doing a jump.

However, Jiggs has set things up so he can take Jack's payment for the parachute jump. Jack doesn't know it, but Jiggs takes Jack's money and goes down into town with it to buy the boots he had put on hold at the shoemaker's shop earlier in the morning. So now Jiggs has a pair of boots -- but the family doesn't have anywhere to sleep for the night. And they won't get their money for Shumann's racing performance until the next day!

As the reporter follows the little boy, and sometimes some of the other family members, he begins to get involved with their strange story. The reporter seems to be a real literary type in his own mind, even though it appears that most people see him as being something of a mix between a Frankenstein and a tapeworm. He's very tall, very thin, pale, and sunken-eyed. He seems to react extremely slowly to everything. And once he's attached to something he's stuck to it -- like a parasite.

In fact, he would have lost his job a long time ago, except that he also had the ability to cling to his reporting job like a parasite. He has an extremely mother, too, and that helps. She followed him to his job, without him knowing, at first, and bullied his boss into basically never letting him go from the job.

It's not really clear why the mother doesn't do more to actually make the reporter do more with his own life. But she doesn't. She only makes sure that the reporter's boss, a man named Hagood, always keeps her son working at the paper. So Hagood gets frightened into becoming something of a father-substitute for the reporter.

But the reporter, as literary as he may be, is not really a good reporter. He can't seem to find or write news. He can only go into spilling rants on the emotional state of either himself or the people in the situations that he has gone out to cover as newsworthy.

To make matters worse, the reporter always seems to be in the right place at the right time. He's always around when news is made, and he's always around the most newsworthy people. He even seems to contribute in some way or another -- all the time! -- to the events that actually become news. But he can never actually write about the news that he's standing right in front of, or even making happen!

To top all this off, the reporter is always borrowing money from Hagood, even though the reporter apparently makes a decent, or at least liveable, salary. But Hagood's afraid not to lend money to the reporter, just like he's afraid to fire the reporter: he doesn't want the reporter's extremely wealthy mother to come after him.

But the reporter also has no focus. And when he comes into the city room of the newspaper office to tell Hagood his news, all he tells Hagood is the whole emotional story of the family he'd hung out with all day long. Hagood gets angry at the reporter's inability to come up with a real story, so he tells the reporter he's going to fire him if he doesn't come up with a real story tomorrow. Hagood tells the reporter to go home and get some sleep, and to be back at the airshow first thing in the morning.

But the reporter doesn't go to sleep. Instead, he goes out partying with the rest of the Mardi Gras crowd. While he's stumbling through the crowd, he runs into Jiggs, who is wearing his new pair of boots. Jiggs takes the reporter to the hotel where the family thought they were staying. They thought this until just recently, when Jiggs finally let them know he had spent their hotel money on his new boots.

The family has been nursing drinks at the hotel, where a lot of people are partying at the bar. But they really want to get some sleep. Somehow, they get the idea to go to some run-down hotel that's kind of half-brothel, where they figure they can get some sort of deal on a room, or at least find a place for the little boy to sleep. But they run into some troubles there that I can't really remember very well. And they have to go somewhere else.

During all this, the reporter has called up Hagood again and let him know that he had run into the aviator family again. He gives some long, rambling speech to Hagood. But Hagood doesn't want to hear it. He flat-out tells the reporter he's fired. The reporter, who has been "fired" by Hagood before, nevertheless manages to take this seriously.

The reporter decided to let the aviator family stay at his house while they're waiting to receive their prize money. It eventually becomes obvious that he's doing this because he's in love with the woman. He keeps on fantasizing that somehow he'll be able to sleep with the woman, just like Jack and Shumann do. But it never happens.

On the way to the reporter's house, the reporter picks up a humongous jug of absinthe, which apparently has a laudanum kicker in it! The reporter takes the aviator family home and treats them all to a party. Shumann and the woman go to bed with the little boy in the reporter's room. Jiggs and Jack stay up and party with the reporter.

At one point Hagood -- again afraid of the extremely wealthy mother -- visit's the reporter's house and tells Jiggs to tell the reporter (who is now too drunk to face Hagood) that he better show up at the airport at 10 AM the next day to cover the rest of the airshow.

Jiggs and Jack kind of bully the newspaper reporter around a little. Then they fall asleep. The reporter, who has no focus, really, and can't ever really seem to get to sleep unless he passes out altogether, gets up and goes out to a diner. He's blind drunk, and he has some kind of queasy period of philosophical introspection as the sun rises.

The next morning, Jiggs, who is a recovering alcoholic, is already back to being hooked on booze because of the absinthe he'd drank all night long. And as soon as he wakes up he starts drinking again. Shumann's kind of upset about this because he knows that his plane needs to get a major tune-up before it goes out on another race. And he's starting to suspect that Jiggs, the mechanic, will be too drunk to fix the plane.

Nobody knows where the reporter is, and they all decide to leave without him. But as they are leaving, he is coming back. But right as he comes back to his house, he passes out, completely drunk, completely smashed, and, finally, too exhausted to stay up any longer.

The family all rolls the unconscious reporter for the money he has in his pockets. But they then feel bad. So they give the passed-out reporter back all of his money except enough money to buy all of them some breakfast. The family then leaves the reporter passed out outside his door and goes up to the airport. The reporter's maid comes by later, takes a few more bucks off of the reporter, then wakes the reporter up, gets him cleaned up, and helps see him off to the airport.

Up at the airport, the aviator family works on fixing up the plane for the day's race. But Shumann and Jack both have to go to some aviator's union meeting. They think they're going to have to strike -- as if the union wants the aviators at the airshow to get paid more prize money.

It actually turns out that because, on the previous day, one of the major aviators died in an air crash. His name has to be taken off all the airshow programs. So the airshow programs all have to be reprinted. And this will have to be done with the money in the prize pool. All the prizes will be reduced by two and a half percent. Even though some aviators grumble about this, it's generally thought not to be a very big deal at all.

Shumann and Jack head back to the plane -- only to find that Jiggs has abandoned his job of fixing the plane. He's off the plane, and off the wagon: he's gone off to the airport bar to get even drunker! Now Shumann and Jack have to do a really quick job of fixing the plane before Jack does his jump and Shumann does his race!

The reporter, finally arriving at the airshow, in his perpetual state of non-focus, somehow manages to run right into the now drunken Jiggs. Jiggs is beligerent and almost gets into a fight with a few people. He almost gets both himself and the reporter arrested, by a policeman who doesn't really like the reporter to begin with.

In the meantime, Jack has done his jump and has injured himself in the process. But he's stil angry enough with Jiggs to sock him hard enough in the face to knock him out. He also manages to sock the reporter in the face.

Somehow -- I can't quite remember how -- things get minorly patched up. The reporter finds the woman and tells her that the aviator family can have his place. He's going on some out of town assignment, so he can get away from the family. He's really latched onto the family -- mostly because he's extremely sexually attracted to the woman. But he also wants to do a good deed for them. So he's going to let them stay at his place while he goes out of town.

But -- I think -- while he's trying to explain all this to the woman, Shumann's plane crashes and catches on fire. Shumann ends up being okay. But the plane is completely destroyed.

It seems like Shumann is out of the airshow altogether, and that the family is out of its most important means of subsistence: the plane. But the reporter knows someone in town, a man named Ord, who was himself a great aviator, and who now owns an airplane shop. The reporter knows that Ord has a plane that the reporter might be able to get for cheap for the family.

So Shumann and the reporter go alone together to meet Ord. Ord doesn't want to sell the plane to Shumann. There's something wrong with the plane, and he doesn't feel like it's safe to fly at all. That's why it's been sitting in his hangar all this time, instead of getting sold, while he's been perfectly fine with selling other planes.

But the reporter and, to a lesser degreee, Shumann figure they won't take no for an answer. The reporter sends Shumann back home. The reporter then hatches up a scheme for basically stealing Ord's plane.

In the meantime, Shumann takes Jiggs out and tries to get him sobered up. After Shumann and Jiggs go out to try to get some food into Jiggs, so he'll be a little more sober (it doesn't really work), they go back home.

In bed, Shumann discusses his plans with the woman. Shumann has a feeling he's going to get Ord's plane and fly in one of the races tomorrow. One is a low-risk race where Shumann's almost positive he can place and get a little bit of prize money. And one is a high-risk race, where he'll be flying against Ord himself. If the plane is really as faulty as Ord says it is, Shumann believes he shouldn't fly in the high-risk race. But the high-risk race offers more money. So Shumann figures he probably will do the high-risk race after all.

At the newspaper office, which is where the reporter basically spends the whole night, possibly -- I think -- passing out for a couple hours over his typewriter, the reporter comes up with a plan for getting the plane. He types up a fake check for the plane. He then signs his name to it. He figures he'll get Shumann to sign his name, as well as his father's name, to it.

Shumann's father is -- I think -- a farmer and a country doctor, who already mortgaged away a farm he once owned in order to help Shumann get another plane. But Shumann doesn't keep in really good contact with his family, especially since he married the woman, who Shumann's family doesn't think is a good person at all.

So the next morning, Shumann and the reporter meet and go back to Ord's farm. They watch as Ord flies his own racing plane out to the airport. They then run up to the hangar and trick Ord's assistant, by using the fake check the reporter made, into believing that Shumann and the reporter have bought the faulty plane from Ord.

Shumann and the reporter take the faulty plane on a test flight. They believe they've found the problem, which is something like a center-of-gravity problem, which they think they can solve by using sandbags and a pulley system.

So Shumann and the reporter fly the faulty plane over to the airport. Ord conducts a huge meeting with the event organizers to get Shumann barred from flying the faulty plane in the race. But the event organizers want Shumann in the race. The more planes, the merrier. Plus, Shumann will be flying one of Ord's planes. Ord is a flying legend. It was good enough that he'd be flying in the race. But now he'd be flying against one of his own planes! What could be a better crowd-pleaser than that?

Well, the race happens, and, as you'd expect, the faulty plane breaks. It doesn't just have a center-of-gravity problem. The thing basically splits right in half -- and the back half basically disintegrates!

Shumann can't land the plane safely at all. So, in the last moments of his life, he directs the plane as completely out the crowd's way as he can. He crashes the plane into a nearby lake. He can't escape the plane, and he dies in the lake.

The woman blames the reporter for Shumann's death, and she refuses to talk to him anymore. There's a huge effort to recover Shumann's body from the lake. It lasts all day, into the night, and then into the next morning.

The reporter stays near the lake -- not really because he wants to be around when Shumann's body is finally pulled out of the lake, but because he keeps on thinking he'll be able to see the woman again. But the woman does her absolute best to keep the hell away from the reporter. She really feels like if the family hadn't had anything to do with the reporter from the beginning, Shumann would still be alive.

Eventually, toward the middle of the next morning, it becomes clear that it's going to take a long time for the machines first to locate the plane, and then to actually get Shumann's body out of the plane. The lake is a completely junked mess -- people have been dumping old cars and all kinds of other junk down there for years. Now if something gets stuck there, it's seriously stuck. Shumann and his plane are no exception. It may even be impossible to get Shumann's body out.

So Jack comes along and tells the reporter, who is still doggedly hovering around the lake, in hopes of seeing the woman again, that he, the woman, and the boy are all leaving town. Jack requests that once Shumann's body is pulled from the lake, the reporter send Shumann's body to an address in Ohio, which -- I think -- is the address of Shumann's parents. Jack gives the reporter the prize money from Shumann's first flight so that the reporter can buy a coffin and pay transportation charges on getting Shumann's body to Ohio.

The reporter, now defeated, goes home. It's not quite mid-day yet. The reporter manages, yet again, to run into Jiggs. The reporter takes Jiggs home. Jiggs and the reporter get a little bit drunk, as usual.

Jiggs tries to fix his boots. They're already a bit worn out. But he figures he's going to try and sell them back to the shoemaker so he can give the money to Jack and the woman before they leave town. Jiggs himself is also getting ready to leave town, in some other outfit, of course. Jack and the woman are through with Jiggs.

But Jiggs' methods of fixing his boots are all pretty terrible. Nevertheless, Jiggs takes his boots back to the shoemaker and gets -- five dollars! This was probably a bargain, because, as far as I can tell, all the weird-ass things he did to try to get his boots back to a normal condition probably wrecked them altogether.


So Jiggs ends up getting a bunch of candies and gifts for Jack and the woman. He's planning on dropping all this stuff in a package with the rest of Jack and the woman's luggage before they get onto their ride out of town. I think it's assumed that he is no longer on speaking terms with Jack and the woman.

While preparing, with Jiggs, to drop off the packages of candies and gifts, the reporter finds out that the authorities are going to give up on pulling Shumann's body out of the lake. So now the reporter can give the money back to Jack and the woman. One little kind of surprising incident happens here, which has a bit more of a surprising repercussion toward the end of the book. So I won't mention it.

Jiggs and the reporter part ways. The reporter goes up to the airport again. He gets drunk with a bunch of reporters who are waiting for the morning to come, so they can report on something about the lake. They're all playing a poker game. Something happens -- I really can't remember what -- to make the reporter go back into town.

The reporter meets one last time with Jiggs. I really can't remember what happens at that last meeting between Jiggs and the reporter. But after that, the reporter goes off by himself again and gets blasted drunk. After he gets drunk he heads back into the newspaper office and types up an article about Shumann dying.

In the meantime, Jack and the woman have travelled a certain distance. And now it's time for the two of them to part ways. Jack gets the woman and the little boy into a cab. The cab takes the woman and the little boy to the house of Shumann's parents. The woman leaves the litte boy with the parents. A couple of tiny surprises happen here.

The book then ends with a young worker at the newspaper office picking up the typed copy of the reporter's article. The reporter has left to go get drunk again. He's left the typed copy on his desk. The young worker thinks this article is like the beginning of some literary masterpiece. At the end of the article the reporter has scrawled out a nasty article to his boss Hagood, ending even that with a request to borrow a little bit of money.

*****

Pylon -- which I'm pretty sure is one of the more undeservedly neglected of Faulkner's books -- spans a few different genres. It is a literary book. There are passages in the book which are purely poetic, incredibly well-written. But the book is also a pulp-novel, a sensational story of love and death. And -- at the same time -- the world it describes, while being easy enough to imagine as a horse-racing story or a boys' adventure story, is also "high-tech" enough for its time that it could possibly be considered to border on science fiction.

Isaac Asimov's novel The Robots of Dawn is a science fiction novel. But it's also a mystery novel -- and very much in a tradition like that of Raymond Chandler. In fact, as I was reading through this novel, I felt a lot of similarities between The Robots of Dawn and Chandler's novel The High Window.

So this genre-straddling, which Asimov is a master of anyway, is one thing in common with Pylon and The Robots of Dawn. But the other thing in common is: a dead husband.

Just again -- I realize that right here I've given away a spoiler. I'm probably going to feel worse about giving away things with this novel than I was about giving things away for Pylon. This is probably because it's pretty hard to read Pylon. So if people have help, even at the cost of spoilers, they'll probably feel grateful, not angry. But The Robots of Dawn is a mystery, and a pretty easy read.

Anyway, The Robots of Dawn is the final book in Isaac Asmiov's Lije Baley Robots Trilogy. The first two books in this trilogy are The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. This trilogy takes place in the distant future. Human beings on Earth have come to live underground, in gigantic, cave-like cities. But other planets have also been colonized by earthlings.

The people who have colonized these other planets are called Spacers. There are fifty Spacer worlds. Each of them are different. But, apparently, the two most elite of the Spacer worlds are Aurora and Solaria.

Life on Aurora and Solaria has become, in some aspects, so developed and advanced that the citizens of those planets live for three or four hundred years. They have basically freed the planet of infectious microbes, as well as the directly-shown violence that often leads to war.

But Aurora and Solaria are two vastly different planets. On Solaria there are only a very few human beings. Each human adult bascially lives in complete isolation, on huge estates just for them. They are generally served by whole companies of robots. But the robots also generally don't make their presence felt. Solarians are afraid of contact, even with each other.

There are fewer people on Aurora than on Earth. But there are still more people on Aurora than there are on Solaria. But, like on Solaria, the robot population largely outnumbers the human population. But on Aurora, human contact is accepted -- or, rather, contact between Aurorans. Aurorans have multiple sexual partners.

Sex isn't really much more than a sport to the Aurorans. Even marriage, which still exists, is only around to make childbirth official. And most couples don't even raise their children. What's more, Aurorans, who appear to be the most technologically advanced of all the Spacer worlds, which are generally all more advanced than Earth, tends to look down on all the other worlds, including Earth.

But somehow, the Earthman, Lije Baley, is called up to the planet Aurora to solve a case of "roboticide." As Lije Baley comes to see things, this is eventually the same thing as murder, in a sense. Earthmen are generally seen by the Spacer worlds as little more than barbarians. All the inhabitants of the Spacer worlds came from Earth. But the Spacers would rather forget that fact.

Nevertheless, this is the third time Plainclothesman Baley has been called in to investigate a mystery having to do with the Spacer worlds. Each time Baley's been called to solve these mysteries, it's been a mystery to him that he, an Earthman, has been called on by people who think of themselves as so superior to him.

The first mystery regarded the murder of a diplomat. It was thought that a robot had committed the murder. The second mystery regarded the murder of a man on Solaria. Again that mystery was thought to be the fault of a robot. In both these mysteries it seemed -- and ended up being -- impossible for a robot to have killed a human being.

This is because of the three laws of robotics, which Isaac Asimov came up with, I think, for his book I, Robot. The three laws are the most important laws for a robot to obey. They inform all the decisions a robot makes in the performance of its tasks. They are (paraphrased) 1. A robot cannot harm a human being; 2. A robot must obey all human orders, unless they break rule number one; 3. A robot must never harm itself, unless obeying the rule would break rule number one or two.

The first murder mystery Baley solved led Baley to consider the possibility of Earthmen going out in the universe and colonizing planets of their own. This was off limits, according to Spacer rules. But Baley began to get the idea, and spread it to other people.

The second mystery, of the murder on Solaria, strengthened Baley's interest in helping Earthmen colonize worlds. But the mystery also led Baley to meet a Solarian woman named Gladia Delmarre. Gladia's husband was the man murdered on Solaria. Gladia's relationship with her husband was terribly cold and frustratingly distant -- as were all relationships on Solaria.

Gladia simply couldn't function on Solaria. The life of complete individuality and isolation, where even husband and wife lived on separate estates, miles away from each other, was too much for Gladia too handle. She needed to live in an environment with more people. So Baley, who'd ended up befriending Gladia, managed to help Gladia move to Aurora.

Back on Earth, Baley had finally been developing real plans, with communities of people, to re-acclimate Earthmen to above-earth living, or, as Earthmen call it, being on the Outside. He was getting ready to find some way to propose to the Spacer worlds that Earthment should be allowed to colonize other planets.

But, unbeknownst to Baley, these plans were already being formulated by somebody on Aurora: Dr. Han Fastolfe, the greatest known roboticist. Aurorans were themselves drawing up plans for the colonization of other worlds. But the Aurorans thought their world-system was the best. And they didn't want any colonists, even Auroran colonists, deviating from the basic plan of creating worlds exactly like the Auroran worlds.

So one major Auroran proposal was that only Aurorans would be able to colonize additional worlds. And that the actual building out of the world would be in the charge, not of humans, but of robots. Robots would be sent out to new worlds and build out these worlds so they were exactly like Aurora. Then Aurorans could go to these new worlds and live there.

However, the building-out process would take a long time. And it was thought that the best way for all this to be taken care of would be if the robots were as much like humans as possible. Robots had developed a lot over the years. But most robots were not "humaniform." A humaniform robot is a robot that, in its form, most of its actions, and almost all of its mental processes, is indistinguishable from human beings.

But, as far as robot technology had gotten, there were only two humaniform robots in existence. One, Daneel Olivaw, had served as Lije Baley's partner in his previous two murder mysteries. The second, Jander Paneel, was the robot who'd been put out of commission -- somehow -- on Aurora. Both of these robots, normally, lived on Aurora. And both of them had been created by Dr. Han Fastolfe.

Dr. Han Fastolfe had created the only two humaniform robots in existence. And he'd determined that he wouldn't give up his secrets for creating humaniform robots. On top of this, he didn't want humaniform robots to be used in the colonization of other planets. Even worse, he advocated colonization by Earthmen, who, most Spacers thought, were simply barbarians. Dr. Han Fastolfe, a member of the Auroran legislature, had many people who would like to see him out of power, so he could not make it so that Earthmen could colonize other planets.

And then, suddenly, Jander Paneel was found, put out of commission. Murdered, as Baley would eventually come to see it. And Fastolfe's enemies began to see their chance. If they could prove that Fastolfe had put his own robot out of commission, for one reason or another, this kind of violent act would prove him not fit to sit in the legislature. He'd lose his political power. And his ability to advance colonization by Earthmen would vanish.

So, now, Fastolfe is in a tough spot. But, through Gladia's urging, he decides to call Baley to the planet to investigate. Baley comes to Aurora to investigate. Baley is attended by Daneel Olivaw, the robot who had served as his partner in the previous two investigations, and by Giskard, a non-humaniform robot.

Baley's first meeting is with Fastolfe himself, who gives him all the details. Fastolfe makes a few things clear. First of all, he's the only one who can create humaniform robots. Second, he's the only one who can create humaniform robot-brains. Third, he's the only one who understand the functioning of humaniform robot-brains well enough to have disabled Jander Paneel's brain.

Fastolfe knows he didn't kill the robot, though. He assumes that what really happened to the robot was a random disturbance in the magnetic field of the robot's brain. But random chance doesn't save Fastolfe. All Fastolfe's enemies would only argue that Fastolfe was using random chance as an excuse, to mask his real guilt. And Fastolfe would be thrown out of the legislature anyway. And then Earth would not be allowed to colonize other planets. Only Aurora would.

The case sounds hopeless. Fastolfe actually continually insists that it's hopeless. Baley wonders why on earth he'd been asked by Fastolfe to come here, if he thought the case was so hopeless. But then Baley goes to meet with Gladia. And Gladia reveals the fact that she wanted Baley to come and investigate. She urged Fastolfe to have Baley come from earth to investigate.

Gladia discusses emotions she'd felt for Baley, and why she'd wished for Baley to come back to the Spacer worlds. She'd come to understand what love was, just by a fleeting touch she'd given to Baley's cheek during their previous meeting. Life on Solaria was so isolated and loveless that even touching the cheek of someone caring like Baley almost made Gladia have an orgasm. And it would have been her first orgasm ever!

Gladia then discusses her experiences with Auroran men. For almost all of the inhabitants of Aurora, sex is more like a sport. People offer themselves for sex and are most often not denied. There's not much love in it, even though there's a lot more enjoyment of it than there was on Solaria. But what Gladia had been looking for was love -- what she'd started to experience when she'd simply touched Baley's cheek during their last meeting.

Gladia then opens up about her relationship with the murdered robot Jander Paneel. She'd come to discover that he was... completely humaniform. He turned her on. She came to love him. And he became a husband to her. She hid this fact from everybody as well as she could. She was probably right to do so. Nobody would really care, on sex-replete Aurora, whether Gladia was having sex with a robot. But thinking of a robot as a spouse would be beyond absurd. It would be almost offensive.

Gladia mentions that there is one Auroran man who hasn't stopped pursuing her. Despite the fact that, at the beginning of her stay on Aurora, she participated quite a bit in the sex play, to the point where a lot of Aurorans began to think of her as a bit too desperate for sex, this one man who kept pursuing Gladia was the man she continued to deny. His name is Gremionis.

Baley proposes that perhaps Gremionis had killed Jander. If Gremionis was so interested in Gladia, and if he'd managed to find out about Jander being Gladia's lover, not to mention being her husband, Gremionis might be jealous of Jander. Gremionis might have killed Jander out of jealousy. Although the idea seems to affect Gladia, Gladia dismisses the thought. Gremionis is an artist, not a roboticist, and Jander's death could only have been caused by an incredibly skilled roboticist.

Gladia also discusses Fastolfe a bit more. Gladia had become friends with Fastolfe. Fastolfe had a daughter named Vasilia. Vasilia had herself become a great roboticist. But now she hates her father.

Vasilia's relationship with her father was unconventional, by Auroran standards. Usually, children are sent away from the parents after birth, to be raised in a nursery. Children may or may not ever learn who their parents are. They generally don't know or care.

But Vasilia was raised by Fastolfe. This was, again, beyond unconventional. It was almost a breach of laws, and Fastolfe had to do a lot to make it work. But Fastolfe has always seen himself as in-tune with some of the older ways of living, including raising his own children.

Fastolfe came to love his daughter as a father would. But Vasilia came to love her father as a husband. Vasilia wanted her father to make love to her. There was no law against this on Aurora, as long as Fastolfe and Vasilia didn't have any children. But Fastolfe was revolted by the idea. Vasilia continued to pursue her father for sex. But when she finally understood her father would never have sex with her, she left him and became his enemy.

But now Fastolfe has become friends with Gladia, because Gladia reminds Fastolfe of his daughter Vasilia. Fastolfe feels that if he can make Gladia's life pleasant on Aurora, he will somehow have made up for the relationship he's apparently lost with Vasilia.

But these stories seem to get Baley no closer to the truth. Baley goes back to Fastolfe's house and to sleep for the night. The next morning he works, rather hard, in a lot of really fun and surprising ways, to get an actual interview with Vasilia.

The world of Aurora almost appears to be an empty world. The residences and workplaces are all so widely-spaced and hidden from view, or underground in many cases, that the planet almost seems to be uninhabited.

On top of that, Baley himself feels a great deal isolated. As an Earthman, he lives on a planet that hasn't destroyed all infectious microbes. Many people believe his simple presence around them might be able to kill them. So they avoid him. So Baley's investigation on Aurora largely feels like a series of interviews in offices and houses out in the desert.

Baley manages to back Vasilia into a corner, however, so that she'll meet with him in person. Baley, Giskard, and Daneel all go to Vasilia's office. (It's hardly uncalled for for Baley to have brought two robots with him. Everybody has robot attendants, almost all the time. In fact, Fastolfe and Gladia, who are basically neighbors, share a network of seventy-seven robots.)

Vasilia works for the Robotics Institute. This Institute is set up for the cooperation of all Auroran roboticists to work together to advance the development of robots as much as possible. Fastolfe, fearing the creation of humaniform robots for the colonization of other planets, simply for the use of Aurorans, has not become a member of the Institute. And so he's considered an enemy of the Institute. This is all the more reason for Vasilia to be a member of the Institute.

Baley learns that Gremionis, the man who'd been pursuing Gladia, had also been pursuing Vasilia for a little while. But Vasilia would never give in to Gremionis. But Vasilia managed to set Gremionis on to pursuing Gladia. Baley has his own suspicions as to why Vasilia would do this -- mainly so that Vasilia could get someone close enough to have put Jander out of commission. However Vasilia makes a pretty good argument that Gremionis would never have been able to do such a thing.

Leaving Vasilia's office, Baley stops at a public restroom along the road. Gremionis approaches Baley in the bathroom. Gremionis had been contacted by Gladia, who'd told him Baley's theory. Apparently Gladia believed Baley's story more than she'd let on. So now Gremionis was here to prove his innocence.

Baley is hungry. So Gremionis takes him to his house to eat. Gremionis tells the story of why he loved Vasilia, and why he now loves Gladia. His love for both women has to do with a fantasy Gremionis has, very unlike most Auroran's sexual desires, to be in a monogamous relationship with a woman. To have only one sexual partner, his whole life long. Vasilia and Gladia, for different reasons, seem like perfect candidates for fulfilling his fantasy.

Gremionis almost never met Jander, it turns out. And he had no idea that Jander was in a sexual relationship with Gladia. It wouldn't have bothered him, apparently. But being called jealous bothers Jander a whole lot. In fact, calling someone jealous is, on Aurora, a major crime of slander.

Gremionis vows that he, even though he's an artist and not some powerful politician, will get Baley kicked off Aurora as soon as possible. Most Aurorans already don't like the fact that Baley, as an infectious Earthman, is here. A little more bad sentiment about Baley would be sure to get him kciked off the planet.

But Gremionis, after speaking a little more with Baley, seems to forgive him. Baley calls Gladia and lets her know that he doesn't have the opinion any longer that Gremionis was jealous. Baley then calls the director of the Robotics Institute, a man named Amadiro. Again, using his wits to back Amadiro into a corner, Baley gets a personal interview with the man.

A storm has been brewing all day long. Baley, who has very seldom been outside the cave-cities of the Earth, and who has only been in one rainstorm, which was a terrifying experience to him, is not looking forward to the storm. But it seems as if he won't be able to avoid it.

The meeting with Amadiro begins rather cordially -- quite confusing to Baley. But Amadiro eventually begins to show his bitterness toward Fastolfe and his desire to get his hands on the secrets of the humaniform robots. Amadiro seems reluctant to let Baley go. Baley is annoyed with this. He wants to continue his investigations. But Amadiro seems to be stalling him.

But, as the thunderstorm begins, Baley insists on getting back to the car. Amadiro finally relents. Daneel and Giskard, still attending on Baley, have a really difficult time actually getting Baley out to the car. The thunderstorm and the driving rain are really a horrifying experience to Baley. He actually loses his presence and almost passes out altogether.

As it turns out, while Baley, Daneel, and Giskard were in Amadiro's office, Amadiro had some people messing around with their vehicle. The vehicle breaks down on the way back to Fastolfe's house. Giskard mentions that another couple of cars have been following them ever since they left Amadiro's office. (They were, I think, quite a long distance down the road. Giskard's increased sense of vision gave him the ability to tell that they were following from a very far distance.)

Baley realizes that Amadiro had sent robots after them. He wanted to capture Daneel. Daneel was, after all, the last humaniform robot. And Amadiro plainly expressed his desire to get his hands on the secrets of the humaniform robots. So, before the other cars could catch up with this now broken-down car, Baley has Daneel and Giskard leave him, so that Daneel can take refuge somewhere.

Baley is now by himself in one of the most terrifying experiences he, as a cave-city-dweller, can imagine: a thunderstorm. He stays in the car at first, because he thinks it's the only safe place.

The pursuing robots reach the car. But, as Baley assumed, they are only interested in the robots. Baley gives the robots fake directions as to where they went. The robots take those directions. But Baley now realizes that he can't be here once the robots realize that he'd given them the wrong directions.

So Baley leaves the car and runs away through the frightening thunderstorm. Baley has no idea where he's going, and he eventually passes out from shock and cold at the base of a tree.

A few hours later, Baley wakes up in Gladia's house. Giskard, having brought Daneel here for safety, then went out with Gladia, in Gladia's car, to find Baley. The car had broken down not far from Gladia's house, and Gladia and Giskard found Baley quite easily.

Baley is safe and warm. But his mental faculties are still kind of weak from the extreme terror and shock he'd experienced from the thunderstorm. This is my favorite part of the story. At this point, Baley seems to luxuriate in his weakness. Over and over again he fantasizes that he's a little baby -- an infant -- being taken care of by Gladia as if she were a parent.

Baley gets some chicken soup and ends up feeling a lot better, a lot more in control of his mental faculties. He even has enough energy to comfort Gladia a bit more. She's still very upset that she lost her "husband," so to speak. But Baley gets tired and weak again and decides to go to bed. Here he again pretends that he's a little baby -- an infant, as he says.

Apparently Gladia has been aroused by Baley's vulnerable, infantile state. And the love she felt for Baley before has now intensified. She can no longer resist. She comes to Baley's room and makes love to him. I love this idea. A man fantasizes himself to be a little baby, being taken care of by a woman, who then gets turned on by his infantile state and decides to make love with him. Add diapers, and that kind of fantasy would be right up my alley.

The next day Baley and Gladia have a terrific breakfast scene together. And then there is a final showdown scene, which is, I suppose, the closest thing an Earthman would get to a courtroom scene on the planet of Aurora. This is kind of the climax to the book. During and after the climax a few surprising things happened.

I'm kind of disappointed in this post, I have to admit. I've spent all my time summarizing these two novels. I'll get better at condensing the summaries and adding commentary. I have a lot more commentary about The Robots of Dawn than I do about Pylon, I would say.

Actually -- Pylon is such an under-read book that I wanted to give its plot as fully as I could, just so people could see what an interesting book it is. It's hard to get through sometimes, just because of the stream-of-consciousness, poetic passages. But the overall plot is really wild.

And the dialogue of the book -- well -- it's what made me think of Faulkner the script-writer. When you just look at the stream-of-consciousness passages, you wonder how in the hell Faulkner could have been a screenwriter. But when you read the dialogue, and you think of the action -- then you know why people wanted Faulkner as a screenwriter.

So I wanted to accentuate the plot for Pylon, just so maybe if people saw that alone, they might want to give the book a chance. I think, unfortunately, that carried over into my reactions to The Robots of Dawn. I read the two books almost in parallel over the past four days. And I'd read them both because, after going through Book of the Damned and Johnson's Lives so slowly, I just wanted to move through some stuff quickly.

I wanted to pick apart The Robots of Dawn on a number of levels, though. But I messed up by writing a huge summary instead. So, all I can say is, read it. I'm a tremendous fan of Asimov. And this book -- did have some weaknesses, in my opinion -- but, overall, it was a whole lot of fun, like just about everything Asimov wrote.

Our Bloody World -- Book of the Damned (Part Three)

(Note: The quotes in this post are from the Project Gutenberg version of the Book of the Damned. Below is a link to this book, which is downloadable for free.

Book of the Damned)

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, when Charles Fort wrote the Book of the Damned, the biggest catalyst for scientific and philosophical ideas has seemed to be Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity. In fact, Einstein is still influencing us all, even today! But Charles Fort's philosophy seems to be based about a hundred years back, in Hegel's theory. And the real modern catalyst for Fort's philosophy seems actually to have been the invention of the airplane.

Fort says, "I think that the stronghold of Inclusionism is in aeronautics. I think that the stronghold of the Old Dominant, when it was new, was in the invention of the telescope."

It's interesting to see that, rather than seeing people's ideas being the catalyst for other peoples' ideas, Fort sees inventions, mechanisms, as being the catalyst for other people's ideas.

Now, Fort's chief focus for anomalous is matter that falls from the sky. Near the end of his book, Fort confirms this for us:

"Throughout this book, the datum that we are most impressed with: -- Successive falls."

The study of matter falling from the sky took up about the first third of Fort's book. But, even once Fort has moved on from that topic, he continues to return to it.

Fort feels indebted to aviation for opening up the skies to him. But the skies are full of monsters for Fort. And, in the last third of his book, Fort is constantly giving warnings to aviators to be careful when they go too high up into the skies.

These warnings are largely based on Fort's expression that there are regions in the sky that contain water, ice, and even some kind of gelatinous material. So, making reference to the watery areas in the sky -- areas like actual lakes in the sky -- Fort warns aviators to wear bathing suits.

When making reference to the gelatinous areas of the sky, Fort warns aviators about flying into these areas:

"The shaky, protoplasmic seas of the Genesistrine -- against which we warn our aviators, or they may find themselves suffocating in a reservoir of life, or stuck like currants in a blanc mange."

Fort also mentions areas in the sky where gravity is inert and material collects, decays, and dried out. He assumes that there are areas in the sky where blood has collected and dried. He claims that, in the future (his future), aviators will go up into the sky and map these vast Deserts of Blood, where the blood has decayed and dried to the point of being like sand.

All in all, the sky sounds like a terribly dangerous place to Charles Fort. And I think there's a reason behind this. When aviators started tearing open the sky, they began tearing open -- symbolically -- a portion of the human psyche, a portion of the human unconscious. I think for Fort this had a very strong impact when it was realized that aviators could pierce through, or "tear open," in a sense, the daytime sky.

During the daytime, the sky is blue, and the sun makes everything light. During the night, it's like the sky is gone, revealing a vast, dark universe. In this sense, one could think of the daytime sky as consciousness, and of the nighttime sky as the unconscious.

But it became obvious, as aviators began to float higher and higher into the air, that the daytime sky could be pierced, eventually, and that the daytime sky, the symbol of our consciousness, would be pierced through, leaving even our conscious life open to the vast, dark expanse of our night sky, our unconscious.

I'm sure people are still working through the problems of this. Our concern with the ozone layer is a very valid and serious physical concern. But it can also be equated with our conception of the effects of aviation, and how it has permanently torn a hole in our daytime sky, our conscious sky, leaving us constantly open to intrusions from the night sky, the unconscious.

Now I'm sure that Fort also thought of the earth, the ground, as an element of the unconscious. So, as Fort saw that, if travel out of the earth's atmostphere became possible, then the equating of the daytime sky with the nighttime sky would be a possibility. And the night sky has already, for millennia, been equated with the earth. So, now, the day sky would also be equated with the earth.

Because of this, I believe that Fort began to work out the theory he did work out, based on elements from the earth or the water (another symbol for the unconscious) falling to the earth from the sky. But Fort worked this theory out based on genuine data related to various newspapers and journals about their experiences with anomalous phenomena.

It seemed, about halfway through the book, that Fort would start to call up more data on objects actually arising from the earth. He started listing data of material found in the ground. But as this material took on less of a purely natural element, and became more like human artifacts, the material then took on a human, living character. It seemed as if we may even start to encounter data showing real, living, intelligent beings.

But as soon as Fort reached this point, he seemed to get afraid. All the data he began to express first went back up into the sky. The areas he'd seen up in the sky, which had, up to that time, been mainly gelatinous, first became watery. They then became ice. Then they seemed to fragment.

Keep in mind -- all of these things happen -- as if it were all a story. But it really is a story of data -- collected data, that Fort relates to us in a method I term as narrative-manipulation. He takes this genuine data and uses the imagery of the data to form a story of his own. He himself almost admits this, saying that he fashions his notions to the data.

But once these icy patches in the sky fragment, all the phenomena Fort relates to us suddenly blast far out into space -- all the way to the sun, in fact, i.e. -- to our real center of conscious -- the main symbol of our consciousness. From this far away point, the data begins coming back to us.

But when the data disappears and shows up near the sun, it takes on the appearance of planets. These planets aren't in any orbit. They all begin floating back toward the earth. And, when the data has reached the earth again, it takes on a personality much like that of the Devil. It's a planet known as Melanicus, which is some kind of Devil-Vampire-Bat, floating between the earth and the moon and watching over us, probably with some kind of evil intent.

I thought that at this point, Fort would definitely begin to show us data of actual visitors to our planet. In fact, through the last third of the book, Fort talks over and over again about visitors to this planet. In one instance, he even wonders "whether sometimes there are visitors to this earth who might be pursued and captured and questioned."

But as soon as Fort mentions that we could capture these visitors, the visitors seem to become huge dragons. Fort returns to his favorite subject, the rains of bloods, and conjectures:

"It may be that an interplanetary dragon had been slain somewhere, or that this red fluid, in which were many corpuscles, came from something not altogether pleasant to contemplate, about the size of the Catskill Mountains perhaps."

And, from this sudden realization that these "visitors" who might be "captured and questioned" could possibly be "something not altogether pleasant to contemplate," Fort goes from thinking of it being at all possible for us to capture our visitors, to thinking of ourselves as the ones who are to be captured:

"Our greasy, slimy brains. That they may be of some use after all: that other modes of existence place a high value upon them as lubricants; that we're hunted for them."

Fort revisits this possibility when he discusses unidentified objects in the sky (a long time before the term Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO, went public). One UFO looked like a hot-air baloon with fishing nets attached. Fort says:

"I think that we're fished for. It may be that we're highly esteemed by super-epicures somewhere. It makes me more cheerful when I think we may be of some use after all."

Now this last statement of Fort's is very interesting. "It makes me more cheerful when I think we may be of some use after all."

This could be considered a sarcastic remark. But Carl Jung has often pointed out the passage in the Upanishads where the singer rejoices, "I eat food! I eat food! I am food! I am food!" Fort expresses the same sort of happiness. There is a greater cosmic principle to Fort's searchings. If he ends up being food for aliens, this is fine with him, just like it was fine for the singer of the Upanishads, because it was for some greater cosmic principle.

This is, interestingly, at odds with some of the ideas of modern investigators into these anomalous phenomena. Some of them, such as Laura Knight-Jadczyk, seem to believe that, indeed, the aliens do want to harvest and eat us. But this is bad for Knight-Jadczyk, whereas it seems to be okay for Fort and the Upanishads.

I'm pretty much a baby, but I don't seem to have any soft spots on my skull. My skull is actually really thick. So I'm pretty sure that's why I didn't see all of this until I'd gotten most of the way through the Book of the Damned. But it suddenly began to dawn on me that Fort's encounter with the unconscious was a much larger encounter than a personal encounter. It was a cosmic encounter with the unconscious.

In fact -- Fort's first encounter with something like a living, intelligent element in his unconscious was *almost* with fairies and giants, but it was *really* with poltergeists, which he rejected pretty much right out of hand. Fort's unconscious maintained its intelligence. However, it went all the way to the sun before coming back.

When Fort's unconscious came back, it was as huge as a small planet. But it was still intelligent -- in the form of Melanicus.

And, really, the final third of Fort's book begins with phenomena that Fort describes as eclipses. But, Fort claims, these eclipses were not predicted by astronomers. They were spontaneous. Fort asserts that these eclipses were caused by these smaller planets, or these super-constructions (Fort's term for what we would think of as gigantic spaceships) coming into close contact with the earth.

Fort asserts that these bodies can actually get pretty close to the earth, because the same band of gravity-inert space surrounding the earth can actually neutralize the planet getting close to us, so that the two planets aren't drawn completely together. However, certain parts of the two planets occasionally still manage to get sucked down from one to the other planet. This would account for some of the dirt-rains, fish-rains, etc., that follow these strange eclipses.

Since these eclipses, or planetary encounters, are often accompanied by earthquakes, Fort calls his theories surrounding this idea "Advanced-Seismology." He gives four major characteristics of Advanced-Seismology:

"Our data: -- We take them from four classes of phenomena that have preceded or accompanied earthquakes: -- Unusual clouds, darkness profound, luminous apearances in the sky, and falls of substances and objects commonly called meteoritic or not. -- Every one of them is datum of a quaked body passing close to this earth or suspended over it."

Fort also mentions luminous objects moving along with earthquakes, implying that the luminous objects were affecting the gravity of the earth somehow, so that it seems the luminous objects were like planets.

Fort then mentions howls, like wolf-howls, that have accompanied some of these strange earthquakes. Fort relates this wolf-howl sound to the attraction of the planets. But he does so in a way that imputes feeling, if not actual intelligence, to the planets themselves:

"The loves of the worlds. The call they feel for one another. They try to move closer and closer and howl when they get there. The howls of the planets. I have discovered a new unintelligibility."

What's most interesting to me about all of this is that the sky is directly equated with the earth. The daytime sky is eclipsed, or turned into a night sky, by another planet, which passes so close to our own earth that it actually in our atmosphere -- in our daytime sky, in other words. But this other planet draws our earth up to it, while we draw its earth down to us. Our earth and the sky's earth are both opening.

Later on in the book, Fort asserts that we have a mirror world up in the sky. He claims that our earth's spring, in our northern hemisphere, is that mirror earth's autumn, in the hemisphere matched up with our northern hemisphere. So we occasionally get unseasonal falls of leafs, or actual rains of leafs, from that planet, when the planet passes close enough for our gravity to affect it.

When matter is exchanged between the two planets, Fort calls is celestio-metathesis. The celestio metathesis is usually of Fort's normal variety: mud-rains, fish-rains, frog-rains, and leaf-rains. But sometimes it is much scarier than that. Fort actually gives the testimony of a Humboldt, who, during the apparently anomalous earthquake of Riobamba, saw that "bodies were torn upward from graves;" and that "the vertical motion was so strong that bodies were tossed several hundred feet in the air."

Here you have dead human elements, buried in the unconscious, actually being pulled up into the mirror-earth of the unconscious in the sky. It's pretty scary stuff. Even scarier than this, though, is Fort's next piece of data, about an earthquake in Lisbon, where an entire quay, "we are told," went down into the water. But Fort claims it was actually sucked up into the sky -- up into the planet that was passing through our atmosphere at the time.

"The quay and all the people on it disappeared. If it and they went down -- not a single corpse, not a shred of clothing, not a plank of the quay, not so much as a splinter of it ever floated to the surface."

Fort then spends a little time theorizing about all these data. And right after that, he mentions the quote I included above, about Inclusionism being inspired by aeronautics. He then makes the question regarding our own ability to capture visitors. But those visitors, as we've seen, soon turn into gigantic dragons and beings who, besides owning us, hunt us, eat us, and use our "greasy brains" as a kind of lubricant.

But once these visitors have become this quantifiably a threat to us, they seem to shrink, in Fort's narrative-manipulation of the genuine data, from the gigantic, earthquake-causing planets to objects we would more normally, nowadays, consider to be UFOs.

Nevertheless, throughout this section of the book, Fort remains focused on this idea of a cosmic perspective regarding humanity, our own scientific positions, and the roles our own scientific positions, as instances of human thought, play in creating a larger universal awareness.

This all begins with Fort's discussion of the New Dominant. Fort has explained, throughout the book, that every era of thought is controlled by a Dominant. The Dominant is the system, or the organizing factor. Fort states that the Old Dominant was a system of exclusion. The system was organized in a certain way, and any phenomena that did not fit into that system were excluded from that sytem.

The New Dominant, however, is a system of Inclusion. The New Dominant, Fort says, "is calling for recognition of multiplicities of external things." In the era of the New Dominant, Fort claims, people will always be keeping an eye out for anomalous phenomena. They will then find ways to adapt their notions to the phenomena.

The New Dominant, the system of Inclusion, is more expansive than the Old Dominant, the system of Exclusion.

And, it seems to me, the Old Dominant, as a ground for investigation, would be the system on which Carl Jung based his psychology. In Carl Jung's system, various elements of the personality, conscious and unconscious, were integrated into the overall personality. In this way, a person would find enough organized, focused psychic energy to "individuate" as a person, integrating actively, as an individual, into society.

Fort seems to agree with this to some degree. But it seems like Fort's goal is a struggle for wholeness apart from society, as far as this can be achieved:

"Altogether, the point in Positivism here is that by Dominants and their correlates, quasi-existence strives for the positive state, aggregating around a nucleus, or dominant, systematized members of a religion, a science, a society -- but that 'individuals' who do not surrender and submerge may of themselves highly approximate the positiveness -- the fixed, the real, the absolute."

In this sense, I'd believe that Fort is so struck by these images which he then imagines to be evidence of worlds, even mirror-worlds, gravitating toward us because what he's really attempting to block out isn't, for instance, the unconscious of his shadow (the bad parts of himself he might not want to accept), but -- the collective unconscious.

All of us are connected to the collective unconscious -- whether we're "connected" by our genetic similarities to one another or by some underlying element of our spirits that is common to us all -- or by some kind of compromise between the two. In fact, a lot of people have claimed that UFO sightings have been the result of collective hallucinations: in other words, that everybody, for some reason, had some element of the collective unconscious engaged before their conscious sight in such a way that they had a vision that looked to them like a UFO.

There are elements of anomalous phenomena that are not so closely connected to the collective unconscious: namely, phenomena like telepathy, astral projection, and, possibly, psychokinesis. But UFOs, when (or if) they aren't actually genuine extraterrestrial vehicles, are very closely connected to the collective unconscious. So are all of the data that Fort includes in his book.

It's my argument -- could be totally wrong, that Fort knew about Freud and Jung -- I think he'd done some studying of them. He most certainly knew the works of Herbert Spencer, and of William James and the Society for Psychical Research. So, likely, Fort, when he began processing his data, and thinking of himself as something of an alchemist, and, therefore, something of a Jungian, probably began to process this data as a sort of method of individual development.

But it must have become plain that these elements of the unconscious couldn't be fit into personalities such as the anima (the female-figure in the male psyche) or the shadow (the dark side of our personality, which I'd originally equated with Fort's Melanicus). When Fort tried to fit these elements into, for instance the image of the shadow, the shadow became Melanicus, a huge planet, which then caused all kinds of earthquakes, then began sucking up dead bodies, and even live bodies!

But then Fort began to try and fit these images into an anima figure. The anima figure became a gigantic dragon (dragons are typical primitive symbols for the anima in Jungian psychology). But this dragon became something as big as the Catskill Mountains -- and was apparently so horrifying that Fort couldn't even describe it!

It becomes clear that these elements of the unconscious cannot be constrained in "individual" bodies -- unless the individual body is as huge as a planet. Therefore, these elements must actually be manifestations of the collective unconscious.

This would probably be why Fort is so interested in the idea of these alien visitors coming to earth and visiting with secret societies, "secret agents, emissaries," and "certain esoteric ones." The secret society -- in other words, the society of secrecy, is just another way of saying "collective unconscious." I'm not saying that there aren't secret societies. Secret societies may be another piece of genuine data. But for Fort, the secret societies seem to be a symbol for the collective unconscious.

But then Fort imagines or encounters the theory that perhaps the "visitors" are here, for instance, to eat us or use our brains for grease. Not to eat "him," but to eat "us." "We," as a collective, are their "property." So Fort has been able to transfer this element of the collective unconscious into something that has collective applications. Once he has done this, these elements become less gargantuan.

The first UFO to appear is simply a "super-dragnet" Fort imagines floating through the sky, fishing for humans, but accidentally catching birds or sky-high fish. The next one is one which appeared, to the people who gave testimony, as something like a hot air balloon with a dragnet attached to it.

These are kind of silly, kind of menacing objects. But they fit into our earth. They don't cause an apocalypse. Because their function has been quantified correctly: they aren't phenomena of the individual unconscious. They are phenomena of the collective unconscious.

Fort soldifies this point of view by developing his theory with two quotes that make the goal of this process one of collective individuation, so to speak, rather than individual individuation:

"All things -- in our intermediate state -- are phantoms in a super-mind in a dreaming-state -- but striving to awaken to realness."

And:

"In a dreaming mind awakening is accelerated -- if phantoms in that mind know that they're only phantoms in a dream."

Again Fort moves through a discussion of visitors to this earth, and their communications with "certain esoteric ones" on this earth, before he gets into an extended discussion of what we would nowadays think of as UFOs.

Interestingly, at the very beginning of his discussion on UFOs, Fort gives two statements regarding the individual versus the collective, in terms of the positive versus the system or versus the Absolute, of which everything is a part.

In the first statement, Fort says that individual success depends on his ability to surrender, to a degree, to the collective. In the next statement, Fort says that a stoutly, resolutely individual person, isolated from the collective, will suffer -- but that this suffering and isolation are, in a way, a kind of success of their own:

"Success, as it is called -- though there is only success-failure in Intermediateness -- will, in Intermediateness, be yours proportionately as you are in adjustment with its own state, or some positivism, mixed with compromise and retreat."

And:

"Intermediatism, then, is recognition that our state is only a quasi-state: it is no bar to one who desires to be positive: it is recognition that he cannot be positive and remain in a state that is positive-negative. Or that a great positivist -- isolated -- with no system to support him -- will be crucified, or will starve to death, or will be put in jail and beaten to death -- that these are the birth-pangs of translation to the Positive Absolute."

My favorite writer, George Bernard Shaw, might say the same thing about Saint Joan.

After the dragnet UFOs, Fort's next in-depth UFO subject are triangular shadows which appear on clouds. These shadows were seen, by the people who gave the testimony, to travel in pairs, and to remain in rather fixed positions on the clouds they traveled with, regardless of the speed of the clouds or the position of the sun. The shadows also retained their distinctive shapes.

Fort asserts that these shadows are actually created by a UFO trailing two triangular appendages along with it. The UFO traveled relatively to the clouds, but the triangular appendages intercepted light and thus threw shadows onto the clouds. The light apprehended actually came from -- the UFO itself. But this central vehicle, as well as the actual appendages themselves couldn't be seen.

Why? Because the light from these objects wasn't reaching the earth. The light from this UFO "extended down only about to the clouds."

Fort asserts that some types of light act as a force. As the atmosphere gets denser, in lower altitudes, the light cannot get through it. The object would be seen from higher altitudes, but not at lower altitudes. Fort says, "Altogether, it may be conceivable that there are phenomena of force that are interpretable as light as far down as the clouds, but not in denser strata of air, or just the opposite of familiar interpretations."

But before Fort makes these conjectures, he equates this UFO with Melanicus, the vampire-devil planet that preceded the near-apocalyptic earthquakes brought on by whole planets entering our atmosphere. Now, Melanicus is not as huge as the moon. Melanicus is able to fit in our atmosphere, without causing catastrophies. But Melanicus can't be seen from ground level.

Nevertheless, Melanicus has approached the sphere of the earth, has entered the earth's consciousness -- even if only as a poltergeist-like, invisible being. Fort has constructed a reverse-theory of light to accommodate Melanicus' appearance. But now Melanicus -- or these elements of the collective unconscious which had been equated with imaginal planets like Melanicus -- will traverse, like the rains of matter, through Fort's imaginary, but conscious, realms of thought.

And here the UFOs take on the appearances of glowing wheels. They can only survive in earth's thin atmosphere for a short time. They've come from a much denser atmosphere -- i.e. the gelatinous areas that float around the earth. Sometimes these gelatinous areas, to Fort, are like dimensional portals. So ships that come through these gelatinous areas and end up in the earth's atmosphere are coming, not from some space in our sky, but from some other dimension.

But, like deep-sea fish brought up to the air, these ships, more accustomed to denser atmospthere, will disintegrate or explode if they're in our air for too long. So they generally dive into water for relief. Once their bodies have re-attained stability, they can fly up into the air again.

Up until this point, Fort has always remarked that conventional scientists were like deep-sea fish, because things from above always hit deep-sea fish on the head, but they never question whether there is another world from which all these things come from. But now these glowing wheels are the deep sea fish -- for a completely different reason. But the metaphor has completely passed from conventional scientists -- i.e. humans in a system -- i.e. the collective -- and into a symbole for the collective unconscious: the glowing wheels.

Fort assumes that these glowing wheels have generally fallen out of their natural atmosphere and into ours by accident, "because of miscalculations, or because of stresses of various kinds." Earlier on, Fort claimed that a lot of the rains of different matter from these gelatinous areas were caused by atmospheric disturbances. So it wouldn't be surprising if atmospheric disturbances also brought down vehicles, too.

Fort has a number of very beautifully described instances of ships encountering these glowing wheels as they travel just below the surface of the water. And he has some rather harrowing descriptions of these ships plunging into the water. But, as far as I remember, the count of these vehicles actually ascending back out of the water and back up into the sky is rather slim.

Fort also relates how the wheels, after descending a certain distance under the water, disappear. Fort says that this is because the light can only penetrate through a certain amount of density. So it's like the lights in the sky: after a certain amount of density, the objects just become invisible.

Later on, Fort describes whole strings of lights in the sky. Among these groupings of lights, Fort describes the following:

"Three luminous objects, of different sizes, the longest having an apparent area of about six suns. When first sighted, they were not very high. They were below clouds of an estimated height of about one mile. -- Different sizes, and of different susceptibilities to all forces of this earth and of the air."

From this I would guess that there is a whole constellation of these elements, surviving at all different atmospheric and marine levels of the earth. However, these objects never appear visible. The objects come to rest in an area of the atmosphere or marine body which is equal with the level of density that conceals the force of their light.

In other words, the various elements of the collective unconscious find their equilibrium points in the atmosphere -- which would stand functionally for the global consciousness. Collective unconscious and global conscious.

However, after describing the wheels, and before describing the strings of lights, Fort describes an encounter with one glowing wheel that has a stragely mandala-like shape.

Normally, in Jungian psychology, a mandala can be thought of as a circle divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant is a type of personality. The way the types of personality are arranged in the mandala show what kind of psychological development issues a personality might be dealing with. Normally the two bottom quadrants symbolize the unconscious elements of the personality, while the two top quadrants symbolize the conscious elements of the personality. And usually each of the four quadrants gets and equal amount of space.

But in the mandala described by the glowing wheel in Fort's data, three of the sections are all shoved to one small edge of the circle, while the fourth section takes up more than three-quarters of the space. In addition, this huge section has a hook-like shape sticking out of it, even piercing through one of the three small sections.

This mandala would express, I believe, the power of this one unconscious element. It's so strong it pierces through the central element of consciousness, and even extends outside of the circle of the mandala. This would be, I would guess, the extreme strength of the collective unconscious.

However, this mandala then develops, through Fort's narrative-manipulation of the data, into an animal like a stringray floating through the sky. But it's not just one animal. It's a whole bunch of these stingray-like animals, which Fort actually describes as round and dark brown. But he also says they have tails. He lists some strange phenomena worth noting:

"Occasionally one fell to the ground. When the place of a fall was examined, there was found a film, which soon dried and vanished. Often, when approaching the sun, three bodies seemed to link together, or were then seen to be linked together, in groups not exceeding eight, and, under the sun, they were seen to have tails three or four fathoms long. Away from the sun the tails were invisible. Whatever their substance may have been, it is described as gelatinous."

Fort later says that "The datum is important to us, here, as an indication of disruption in this earth's atmosphere -- dangers in entering this earth's atmosphere."

Fort is frightened at how his glowing wheels had developed into a rather strong, tailed mandala figure, and then, straightaway, into a whole cluster of apparently living beings, something like copper-colored stingrays.

He quickly turns away, back into the fall of matter from the sky. But, just as quickly, he returns to instances of these animal-like floating beings, with a description from North Wales of "a disk from which projected an orange colored body that looked like 'an elongated flatfish.'"

This description is part of a huge paragraph full of UFO sightings of all kinds. It's pretty magnificent -- there are so many different kinds of UFOs sighted. But I think what's happened here is that, as the collective unconscious becomes more and more able to find its various functions, it is also allowed to individualize -- so that different people can function from different perspectives of the collective unconscios -- or so that one person can function by using different perspectives of the collective unconscious.

As this section ends, Fort theorizes: "It is one of the most deep-rooted of positivist illusions -- that people are persons. ... So we personify no more -- but we super-personify. ... Autocracy of Successive Dominants -- which are not final -- but which approximate higher to individuality or self-ness, than do the human tropisms that irresponsibly correlate to them."

This statement of higher approximation to individuality is followed by Fort's long discussion of torpedo-shaped or cigar-shaped UFOs. It's interesting to note, in conjunction with this seemingly increased development of the different aspects of the collective unconscious, and the progress it's made on making the collective unconscious less of an earth-shattering entity and more of a part of "individuality or self-ness," that these UFOs are often seen by the witnesses to be about six feet long -- or around the size of a human being. This isn't always the case. But it's often so.

This moves into the discussion of the strings of lights in the sky. The discussion of the strings of lights in the sky eventually merge, passing back and forth between rather calm, placid, almost cold imagery, and very hot, explosive imagery. But this whole section ends with a very frightening tale of a railroad operator seeing a UFO in 1896. The interplay, up until this time, between the cold imagery and hot imagery often stirred up feelings of conflict. But this final story is starkly terrifying.

The operator saw, "in the darkness of a heavy rain, a light that appeared to be round, and of a dull rose color." The object "seemed to be about a foot in diameter."

The operator thought the object was "ball-lightning." However:

"His awareness of 'something else' is expressed in other parts of his letters, when he says that he has something to tell that is 'so strange that I should never have mentioned it, even to my friends, had it not been corroborated... so unreal that I hestiated to speak of it, fearing that it was some freak of the imagination."

What this "something else" was is never discussed. But it was obviously distressing to Fort, who basically ends chapter 26 with this story and begins chapter 27 with this quote:

"Our slippery brains.

Showers of blood.

Showers of blood.

Showers of blood."

Fort doesn't get very far in this chapter, in terms of data, beyond showers of blood and more evidence for dragons exploded in space by comets, and their flesh raining down on this planet, or deserts of blood that aviators will someday map.

But Fort does manage to summarize his Super-Geography well in this passage:

"Gelatinous regions, sulphurous regions, frigid and tropical regions: a region that has been the Source of Life relatively to this earth: regions wherein there is density so great that things from there, entering this earth's thin atmosphere, explode."

He also engages on his most ambitious statement on the collective unconscious. In this statement, the very solar system we live in is conscious. The collective unconscious is a universal consciousness. The solar system is just as much a part of our psychic functioning as are our individual conscious and our individual unconscious.

"Rains of blood that vein albuminous seas, or an egg-like composition in the incubation of which this earth is a local center of development -- that there are super-arteries of blood in the Genesistrine: that sunsets are consciousness of them: that they flush the skies with northern lights sometimes: super-embryonic reservoirs from which life-forms emanate --

"Or that our whole solar system is a living thing: that showers of blood upon this earth are its internal hemorrages --"

The final chapter of this book is devoted entirely, except the final paragraph, to a discussion of tracks found in the snow in Devonshire. These tracks were explained away as a number of things -- including a kangaroo that had apparently escaped from a zoo. Some people said the tracks were from a demon.

Fort gave no answer for this. It wouldn't be expected that he would. The aliens have appeared back on his earth. And -- again -- they are invisible. The tracks are "cup-mark" shaped -- which Fort often mentions, not as footprints, but as a method of communication: electric beams shot into rocks, even though these marks appear in the snow. So there's a chance that this chapter is supposed to be a subtle reminder of communications from these regions, as opposed to an actual presence -- which may be what Fort is advocating.

Drunk, Naked, Starving, Dying -- Johnson's Poets

Having your poem so much loved that it was even quoted by the King was no guarantee that you wouldn't starve to death. Ask Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras. Samuel Butler may not actually have starved to death. But he did die in a condition of want, so much so that future poets equated his death to a starving death.

Butler died in the reign of Charles the Second, who took the throne when it was restored to England, after the usurpation and protectorship of Oliver Cromwell.

If Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, criticizes the harshness of Puritan life which took place under Cromwell, he doesn't seem to be much more positive about licentiousness of life under Charles II. As well as poets like Samuel Butler starving, other poets died from simply living too rowdy a life. Many people, including many of the poets, were addicted to gambling.

It certainly seems, from my understanding of Johnson's view, like the only way to live well after the throne was restored was to have been close to the people who had usurped the throne in the first place.

As far as I can tell, the biggest success story of the first volume of Johnson's Lives is the story of Edmund Waller. Waller, being born in 1605, was also, as far as I can tell, the oldest poet in the first volume (and, therefore, likely the whole opus) of Johnson's Lives.

Waller's father left his family with an annual estate of three-thousand pounds. This is by far the handsomest living that any of the poets has been born with, as far as I can tell. But not only was Waller born well-off. He was also a cousin to Oliver Cromwell.

From the age of eighteen, Waller served at Court. Through his life, he ended up either serving or knowing King James I, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and Charles II.

At Court, Waller heard King James ask, "My Lords, cannot I take my subjects' money, when I want it, without all this formality of parliament?"

Before the Civil Wars, Waller led a relatively calm life. He married into more money than he already had. His wife died while in the birth of Waller's second child. Waller spent some time wooing ladies of the court, but wasn't very successful.

Waller mainly wooed women through his poetry. This poetry is largely the poetry by which Waller is known. It's known for its smoothness, elegance, and gaiety. And Johnson believes that Waller's poetry did a lot to give a sense of taste to English poetry.

But it all seems, to me, like it stands a pretty good chance of being all fluff. Waller names one of his women "Sacharissa," or "Sugary." His writes poems on the occasion of being given a pen or having a card torn up by the Queen.

Nevertheless, one of his statements, praising the Queen, has the kind of outrageous style that Johnson finds disgusting and I find tremendously interesting. Waller says the Queen "saves lovers by cutting off hope, as gangrenes are cured by lopping the limb."

In one poem, Waller expresses to a lover his wish that he may come to her, "And banquet sometimes on thy face," which kind of reminds me of something Hannibal Lecter would do.

After being spurned by all these Ladies, Waller ended up marrying a woman who seemed to make him happy. They had thirteen children together.

Waller took a couple of interesting political stands in his life. In 1640, when King Charles I made a call for money to landowners, Waller, representing Admondesham in parliament, made a speech against giving the King money. Waller's arguments were based on those of the great Richard Hooker. Waller stated that before anybody gave the King money, the King should address the grievances of his people.

But Waller soon found himself standing up for the King, and for Episcopacy, when parliament was trying to abolish Episcopacy. Waller gave a very good speech for retaining, but reforming Episcopacy in England. He then went home and, as a landowner, pulled together the money that the King had requested, so that the King could form an army.

The Civil Wars had started, and now the Puritans were demanding money for building an army of their own, against the King. Waller, trying to do what he could to maintain what he believed was the rightful order of the throne, created a plot to spread propaganda that would quell sedition and keep people from funding an army against the King.

Little known to Waller, however, another man, Sir Nicholas Crispe, was forming a plan to stage a provocation in London. This provocation would encourage the King's friends to stand up and fight for the King. Crispe would provide these newly inspired men with a leader.

A few of the main people involved in Waller's plot were also involved in Crispe's plot, although the two plots were largely unknown to each other. In fact, Waller had no idea of Crispe's plot.

Nevertheless, the two plots were discovered, with Waller at the center of them. Waller, who'd so bravely stood up against, and then for, the King, now confessed absolutely everything to his captors. Johnson paints a picture of Waller grovelling and snivelling, as he gives away friend after friend, including a brother-in-law, who was eventually hung near the front door of his own house.

But the more powerful people involved in the plot were let go. And Waller himself was allowed, after having paid out almost all his estate in bribe-money, to "recollect himself in another country."

Waller went to France for a while, then came back to England out of necessity. He needed to live off the remains of his estate.

Thankfully Waller was the cousin of Cromwell, who granted Waller clemency and even held private audience with Waller on a number of occasions. Waller repaid Cromwell with a poem. Many people believe this is Waller's greatest poem.

But when Cromwell was defeated and Charles II restored the throne to England, Waller wrote a poem in praise of Charles II.

The poem in praise of Charles II wasn't as great as the poem in praise of Cromwell. Even Charles II noticed this. King Charles asked Waller why the poem in praise of Cromwell was better. Waller replied that poets write fiction better than truth, and that since Cromwell's poem was a fabulous fiction, and Charles' poem an honest truth, it couldn't help but be less skilfully made.

Johnson feels this is a silly thing to claim. But he figures it's in character for Waller:

"Poets, indeed, profess fiction; but the legitimate end of fiction is the conveyance of truth; and he that has flatter ready for all whom the vicissitudes of the world happen to exalt, must be scorned, as a prostitued mind, that may retain the glitter of wit, but has lost the dignity of virtue."

And Johnson has another argument for the difference in the qualities of the poems to Cromwell and Charles:

"The Congratulations [of Charles] is, indeed, not inferior to the Panegyrick [of Cromwell], either by decay of genius, or for want of diligence; but because Cromwell had done much, and Charles had done little. Cromwell wanted nothing to raise him to heroick excellence but virtue; and virtue his poet thought himself at liberty to supply. Charles had yet only the merit of struggling without success, and suffering without despair. A life of escapes and indigence could supply poetry with no splendid images."

This statement casts a heavy shadow over the character of Charles II. The reign of the Puritans was harsh for the people living under it. In fact, it was absurdly stringent. But the reign of Charles II, through Johnson's imagination of it, was nothing but licentiousness for the rich and misery for the poor. Unfortunately the poets were often among the poor.

Waller was not one of the poor. As soon as parliament was restored, Waller was employed to represent various lands. He represented there basically until the end of his life. He was known for his speeches, which were either filled with gaiety or applaudable arguments. But applause, Johnson claims, was the main motive for any speech Waller gave in parliament. He didn't make speeches for any altruistically political reasons.

What's kind of interesting about this, though, is that Johnson doesn't seem to make any comment about parliament, or government in general, being, in itself, a form of theatre. If Johnson had seen government as theatre, and had seen what general applause Waller had been getting for his speeches, he might have paid a bit more attention to them. Johnson seems to say, over and over again, throughout his Lives, that public approbation, especially in the theatre, should be the writer's first concern, and that technique should aim toward public entertainment.

Waller died when he was eighty-two years old. Johnson's telling of the story of Waller's last days is chillingly told here:

"Towards the decline of his life, he bought a small house, with a little land, at Coleshill; and said, 'he should be glad to die, like the stage, where he was roused.' This, however, did not happen. When he was at Beaconsfield, he found his legs grown tumid; he went to Windsor, where Sir Charles Scarborough then attended the kind, and requested him, as both a friend and a physician, to tell him, 'What that swelling meant.' 'Sir,' answered Scarborogh, 'Your blood will run no longer.' Waller repeated some lines of Virgil, and went home to die."

But after Waller's life, it's hard to find, in Johnson's first volume of the Lives, a story with more success written in it. Many of the poets were, at one time or another, familiar with one or more of the Kings in this period of history. But none were as fortunate, overall, as Waller. Of course, Waller's success had more to do with being born rich, marrying rich, and holding seats in parliament, than it had to do with being a poet.

In fact, if Waller were only a poet, his life story would likely have been a lot more like Dryden's. Dryden, whose life takes up about half the first volume of the Lives, lived from 1631 to 1710. And, from at least 1658, he was constantly writing something. He was writing because he needed the money. And his writing never really gathered that much money for him.

In 1663, Dryden started writing for the stage. And, for a long while, Dryden wrote mostly for the stage. The amount of work he produced for the stage is pretty incredible. Johnson largely dislikes the work of the stage. He calls many of Dryden's plays immoral. In fact, some of Dryden's plays were immoral enough to get taken off the stage. Johnson bewails the times when he mentions the success of Dryden's plays -- the public likes immoral entertainment.

But Dryden was also writing other works. He wrote occasional poems. He wrote Latin translations. And he wrote criticism, including, in 1668, his Essay on Dramatic Poetry, which Johnson really considers to be the birth of English poetic criticism. In addition to this great work of criticism, Dryden wrote prefaces to many of his plays, which, themselves, were more treatises of poetic criticism than actual statements on the dramatic works.

All through the reign of Charles II, Dryden experienced financial difficulty. This was partly due to the fact that the people in charge of distributing Charles' funds often were lax, if not altogether negligent in their duties. As I understand it, Dryden even had to harangue an Exchequer once, after not having received six months of the salary due to him as Poet Laureate.

However, Johnson also implies that Dryden's constant state of want was at least partly due to Dryden simply lived beyond his means:

"Whether by the world's neglect or his own imprudence I am afraid that the greatest part of his life was passed in exigencies. Such outcries were surely never uttered but in severe pain. Of his supplies or his expenses no probable estimate can now made. Except the salary of the Laureate [which was one-hundred pounds and a trice of wine a year, a pretty good sum], to which King James added the office of the Historiographer, perhaps with some additional emoluments, his whole revenue seems to have been casual; and it is well known that he seldom lives frugally, who lives by chance. Hope is always liberal, and they that trust per promises make little scruple of revelling today on the profits of tomorrow."

Nevertheless, Dryden's state of want doesn't seem to be due to intemperance, in the same sense as the intemperance of the other poets landed them in troubles. He does seem to have gotten more into drink in his later years. But he was never, as far as I can tell, a real abuser of alcohol. And he didn't seem to be addicted to gambling, like many people were, as Johnson tells the story, under the reign of Charles II.

But as far as I can tell, Dryden's life gains most of its interest, for Johnson, from the fact that Dryden was so focused on his art. And Dryden would likely not have been as interested in his art, according to Johnson, if he'd had more money. For, as Johnson likes to remind us, Dryden was no lover of work.

Dryden died in poverty. In fact, he died from gangrene in his legs. A weird story attends his funeral. A funeral, with great pomp, had been put together for him, but was diverted by a group of drunken Lords who wanted to get Dryden buried at Westminster Abbey. They caused a big scene, and stopped the first funeral from happening. It took three weeks, during which a number of arguments took place between the Lords and Dryden's family, before Dryden's body was finally buried in Westminster Abbey.

Again, looking back on this epidsode, which is not a completely verifiable story, Johnson laments the character of Charles II's reign:

"Supposing the story to be true we may remark that the gradual change of manners, though imperceptible in the process, appears great when different times, and those not very distant, are compared. If at this time a young drunken Lord should interrupt the pompous regularity of a magnificent funeral, what would be the event, but that he should be jostled out of the way, and compelled to be quiet?"

However, most interesting to me in Johnson's relation of the story of Dryden is the story of the rise and fall of Elkanah Settle. In 1663, Dryden became the greatest stage-writer of his time. But a few years later, Dryden's superior position was challenged by a man named Elkanah Settle, whose play The Empress of Morocco was wildly successful.

Dryden was terribly jealous of Settle's success. In some ways, who could blame him? As the most popular stage-writer of his time, Dryden was making only a little money from his writings. If someone took the top spot from Dryden, what would happen to Dryden's money? So, possibly just out of fear, Dryden may have felt like he had to condemn Settle's work.

Dryden wrote a scathing criticism of Settle's work. Dryden's criticisms of Settle were often overdone and, in my opinion, absurd, completely unreasonable.

Settle wrote a vindication of his work, and criticized Dryden's work at the same time. In my opinion, Settle's criticisms of Dryden are much more practical and reasonable than Dryden's criticisms of Settle.

In 1681, Dryden wrote his famous work Absalom and Achitophel, a poem in praise of King Charles II, comparing King Charles to King David. Of this poem, Johnson says:

"Of this poem, in which personal satire was applied in the support of publick principles, and in which therefore every mind was interested, the reception was eager, and the sale so large that my father, an old bookseller, told me he had no known it equalled but by Sacheverell's trial."

What Johnson takes a jab at here, Settle had taken an opportunity to attack, in a poem of his own. Settle was quite successful.

In that same year, Dryden wrote another poem, The Medal. Johnson writes: "Elkanah Settle, who had answered Absalom, appeared with equal courage in opposition to The Medal, and published an answer called The Medal Reversed, with so much success in both encounters that he left the palm doubtful, and divided the suffrages of the nation."

However, Settle had been backed, while fighting for his popularity against Dryden, by an Earl. It appeared later on that this Earl had grown jealous of the popularity Settle was starting to gather. So he took his support away from Settle. Settle's fortune dwindled. Settle was reduced to poverty. And he died, basically forgotten by all, in a hospital.

Johnson, however, seems to wish for a better fate to have befallen Settle:

"The man whose works have not yet been thought to deserve the care of collecting them; who died forgotten in an hospital... -- might with truth have had inscribed upon his stone -- 'Here Lies the Rival and Antagonist of Dryden.'"

Another rival to Dryden on the stage was Thomas Otway. And, as Dryden rivalled Settle on the stage, Otway rivalled Settle in tragic poverty.

Thomas Otway first made his appearance on the stage as an actor for one of Aphra Behn's plays. But he wasn't a very good actor. He turned his attentions to writing, and, in 1675, when he was 24 years old, wrote his first play, Alcibiades.

He seemed to be successful from the moment he started writing plays. And his plays remained popular all the way into Johnson's day. Johnson says of Otway's play, "Venice regained":

"The striking passages are in every mouth; and the publick seems to judge rightly of the faults and excellencies of this play, that it is the work of a man not attentive to decency nor zealous for virtue; but of one who conceived forcibly by consulting nature from his own breast."

Nevertheless, Otway's plays were even more dissolute and licentious than Dryden's. And, in Johnson's time, Otway's play Friendship in Fashion was too much for the audience:

"Whatever might be its first reception [in 1678], was, upon its revival at Drury-Lane, in 1749, hissed off the stage for immorality and obscenity."

But, unlike Dryden, who lived a somewhat quiet life, writing in the daytime, dining at mid-day, and spending the evenings at Will's Coffee-House, acting as an arbiter of dramatic questions, Otway partook in the general character of his times. His life was just as rowdy, it appears, as his plays. This made him popular, as Johnson implies:

"Want of morals or decency did not in these days exclude any man from the company of the wealthy and the gay if he brought with him any powers of entertainment; and Otway is said to have been at this time a favorite companion of the dissolute wits."

But these wealthy people would drop a man, as well, as soon as they were no longer entertained by him. And Otway was often left, empty-handed, as the parties ended and he was no longer of any use.

Despite his success on the stage, Otway was left destitute at the age of thirty-four. Two accounts of his final end are related by Johnson.

In one account, which seems to be more widely related, Otway, loaded down with debt, ended up boarding in a public house on Tower Hill. Otway was so poor, he hadn't eaten in days. As Johnson says: "He went out, as is reported, almost naked, in the rage of hunger, and, finding a gentleman in a neighboring coffee-house, asked him for a shilling. The gentleman gave him a guinea, and Otway going away bought a roll, and was choked with the first mouthful."

The other story that Johnson tells finds Otway in the same state of destitution. Only, in this story, one of Otway's fellow boarders on Tower Hill had been attacked by a thief. Otway pursued and apprehended the thief. Then, hot from running, Otway drank from a river. He contracted some sickness from the river and died.

In either case, Otway died at a point in his life where he couldn't even afford to eat.

Otway's story is probably the most tragic of the first volume of the Lives. However, the story of the Earl of Rochester is likely the most lurid.

John Wilmot, who later became the Earl of Rochester, was an incredible prodigy. At the age of twelve, he entered Wadham College. At the age of 14, he attained his M.A.

From his academic achievements, Wilmot went on to display military bravery. He fought at Bergen for the Earl of Sandwich, and distinguished himself in a sea-battle. As Johnson relates:

"Sir Edward Spragge, who in the heat of the engagement, having a message of reproof to send to one of his captains, could find no man ready to carry it but Wilmot, who, in an open boat, went and returned amidst the storm of shot."

From these auspicious beginnings, Wilmot made his way to Court, where, living as a courtier, for Charles II, he took on the deplorable manners which, according to my understanding of Johnson, natually became the Court in those days.

Johnson's distaste for this age seems reasonable. Probably the most repugnant story Johnson relates in this volume relates, not to Wilmot, but to Samuel Butler. The Duke of Buckingham had actually given an offer to Samuel Butler to be the Duke's Secretary, while the Duke was Chancellor of Cambridge. Butler a friend were supposed to meet the Duke at the Roebuck. And so they did. However, at the Roebuck, as Wycherley tells the story:

"Mr. Butler and his friend attended accordingly: the Duke joined them; but as the d---l would have it, the door of the room where they sat was open, and his Grace, who had seated himself near it, observing a pimp of his acquaintance (the creature too was a knight) trip by with a brace of Ladies, immediately quitted his engagement, to follow another kind of business, at which he was more ready than in doing good offices to men of desert, though no one was better qualified than he, both in regard to his fortune and understanding, to protect them; and from that time to the day of his death, poor Butler never found the least effect of his promise."

But, looking back to our current subject, Johnson says that John Wilmot, later the Earl of Rochester, after coming to court and being introduced to the manners there, took to the teachings quite well, and "was for four or five years together continually drunk."

Wilmot would conduct all kinds of "gay frolicks," which are not widely recorded, and which Johnson says history is better off forgetting.

Which, of course, makes me want to find them all...

One of Wilmot's "frolicks" was, as Johnson says, that he dressed as other people so that he could get away with having love affairs with people who were considered to be "low" at that time. However, while disguising himself in these ways, he'd often act the parts he played, regardless of what they were, so well that not even his friends would be able to tell who he was, and were amazed to hear that they had actually been in Wilmot's presence.

In one of his guises, Wilmot even lived for a while as a practising physician.

Another of Wilmot's pastimes was writing libellous poems. He would employs footmen to follow Ladies he knew were carrying on intrigues. The footmen would gather what information they could while eavesdropping. Once the footmen had passed Wilmot enough information about a number of Ladies, Wilmot would retire into th woods for a couple months. Returning, he'd have a whole body of literature libelling various notable Ladies for their lascivious actitivies.

Again -- this sounds exactly like something I'd like to read.

Nevertheless, Johnson wasn't impressed. And his discussion of Rochester's career is almost like a Satanic opposite of the praiseworthy-checklists he spouted off while discussing Milton:

"Thus in a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps more criminal, with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard for every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness, till, at the age of one and thirty, he had exhausted the fund of life, and reduced himself to a state of weakness and decay."

However, Rochester met Dr. Burnet, who helped Rochester mend his ways and take a more Christian mindset. Rochester maintained this mindset until he died at the age of thirty-four.

Charles Sackville, later Earl of Dorset, was also a member of Charles II's dissolute court. He was, like Rochester, a favorite of Charles. And he was part of the same circle of riotous friends as the Earl of Rochester.

These friends had the habit of stripping naked and running through the town, harrassing people. This habit eventually got Sackville in trouble. Sedley, one of Dorset's circle, got drunk at The Cock, in Barn-Street. He stripped naked, ran into the street, and harangued the crowd. The crowd wasn't taking it on this night. They forced Sedley, Dorset, and the rest back into The Cock. Dorset and his friends were arrested.

Dorset wasn't punished, but Sedley was fined five-hundred pounds. So Dorset and his friends went all around town, begging for the money, until they had the five-hundred pounds they needed for the fine.

However, Dorset shaped up not long after all this. He fought in the Dutch War in 1665, and even composed one of his most famous songs, tradition says, on the night before the great Battle of June 3rd, where Britain took eighteen Dutch ships and destroyed fourteen more.

When King James II took the throne, Dorset was given good notices. However, James' reign was soon seen to be a bad rule, and Dorset took part in the revolution against him.

King William succeeded King James, and Dorset was just as popular with him as he had been with James and Charles. However, as Johnson says, Dorset "happened to be among those that were tossed with the king in an open boat sixteen hours, in very rough and cold weather, on the coast of Holland." Dorset got sick and passed away in January of 1706.

Wentworth Dillon, the Earl of Roscommon is known, like Waller, for having improved the elegance of English poetry, though not so much as Waller had.

Roscommon's family's lands were in Ireland. Roscommon was removed from his lands when he was young, as the wars were making life there unsafe. Interestingly, Roscommon seems to have had a telepathic episode, where he saw that his father had died. Johnson included this episode of paranormal perception. He seems to have thought that "by preserving such relations that we may at last judge how much they are to be regarded.

After graduating from Caen in Ireland, Roscommon went to Italy. After Charles II restored the throne, Roscommon went to England. Roscommon was made Captain of a band of pensioners. Here Roscommon became addicted to gambling. Roscommon's gambling addiction led not only to poverty, but also to plenty of physical fights.

At one time, Roscommon's family lands in Ireland came into dispute. So Roscommon had to go back home to see to matters. The Duke of Ormond gave Roscommon the employment of Captain of Guards while he was in Ireland.

However, while in Dublin, Roscommon succumbed again to his gambling habit. He had a fight with three men, who then decided to stalk him and attack him near where he was staying for the night. All three men assailed Roscommon. Thankfully another man was nearby and took Roscommon's side. Roscommon and the man took care of two of the attackers, while the third fled.

Roscommon asked the Duke of Ormond to make this helping man Captain of the Guards in his place. The Duke of Ormond allowed this. Three years later this man died. Roscommon took the position back until he left Ireland.

In England, Roscommon, now having mended his ways, took on various offices for the Crown and court. He also made attempts at forming a society for refining the English language. Roscommon also wrote an Essay on Translated verse. John Dryden supported Roscommon in the attempts to form a society for refining the English language. But the attempts weren't very successful.

In this connection, Johnson, instead of only railing the times of Charles II, actually says something terrific about the times he himself lived in:

"We live in an age in which it is a kind of publick sport to refuse all respect that cannot be enforced. The edicts of an English academy would probably be read by many, only that they might be sure to disobey them."

Roscommon's dreams were further hampered when King James' accession to the throne was accompanied by an almost complete suppression of literary institutions. Roscommon saw that things in England were only going to get worse under King James.

So Roscommon decided to go back to Italy, to Rome. Roscommon seems to have thought that King James' Catholic leanings would make Rome a good place to take refuge. Johnson relates that Roscommon "alleged that it ws best to sit near the chimney when the chamber smoked, a sentence of which the application seems not very clear."

However, as Johnson states, Roscommon's "departure was delayed by the gout, and he was so impatient either of hindrance or pain that he submitted himself to a French empirick, who is said to have repelled the disease into his bowels." And, from this, Roscommon died, in 1684.

But of all the poets in the first volume of Johnson's Lives, the strangest one to me seems to have been John Philips. He seems to have been a golden child -- the only one in the whole volume. He must have been quite beautiful. At least his hair was. For as Johnson says:

"It is related that while he was at school he seldom mingled in play with the other boys, but retired to his chamber, where his sovereign pleasure was to sit hour after hour while his hair was combed by somebody, whose service he found means to procure."

During these hours of sitting and having his hair combed, Philips would read John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Philips later went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he was recognized as a genius. He studied phsyic and loved botany. But he also wrote poetry

The work for which he is most famous is called The Splendid Shilling, a kind of parody of Milton centered around a shilling-piece. This work itself created a whole genre of imitation-poems. He went on to write the poem Cider, about cultivating trees. For all its faults (and Johnson can find faults), Johnson seems to have liked this poem.

Philips suffered from consumption and asthma, and he died in 1708.

Philips also gets praise that not a lot of poets get from Johnson, after Milton: "Philips has always been praised without contradiction as a man modest, blameless, and pious; who bore narrowness of fortune without discontent, and tedious and painful maladies without impatioence; beloved by those that knew him, but not ambitious to be known. He was probably not formed for a wider circle."

It strange to imagine that there was this almost ethereal being floating around England at the same time that all this riotous behavior was going on. But I think Philips matches the environment somehow: an enshrined golden-boy. A mild genius, cloistered with another boy combing his hair, like a Lady and her Maid. And, after producing a few sweet works of genius, the boy passes away from a disease of the breath. His spirit leaves him.