This is an expansion of a thread I posted on Bluesky. The state of affairs on Bluesky is such that some standard disclaimers apply: I am about as virulently anti-GenAI as one can be, often (according to those around me) annoyingly so. The topic makes me cranky in a hurry, and I sometimes fantasize about erecting a sign proclaiming that I Am an AI Hater. I often still use quotes around “AI” because it's not AI, which I fully acknowledge is a lost cause. Throughout this post I will use LLM instead in my references to the products. What falls under the umbrella of GenAI is a collection of rapacious, extractive products aimed at undermining intellectual labor and funneling money and power into the hands of their purveyors. Its hydra-headed push into every sector corresponds with a similar rise in right-wing rhetoric, and its loose connection to the shape of truth makes it a convenient tool for technofascists.

So why use it at all? Call it a combination of cynicism, curiosity, and rational self interest. While I still have something of a choice about whether to use these products at all, even in my daily work, there are places where they've crept in even so, and similar to Michael Taggart's reasoning, there are pragmatic reasons I need to be aware of how they work and how to guard against their many, many pitfalls. For instance, even if I don't use them, others around me are, and if I am going to remain accountable for the outputs of those other people around me from a DevOps and IT security perspective, or from a supervisory perspective, well, I have to know something about them. Additionally, there is a difference in applicability between the two things people are using LLMs for now:

• plausible output that is sometimes, but not necessarily true, and for which establishing truth is costly; and
• plausible output that compiles and can be executed, for which establishing truth is fairly cheap, and which also needn't be “true” in anything but a logical sense.

LLMs produce both of these, but one is, theoretically, more useful than the other. For my money, I simply can't trust LLMs for anything in the first case, so that leaves the second, which is making code.

The main promise of these products is that they'll make you more productive as a programmer. Now, productivity here is always some ratio, generally between quantity of software and the cost to produce it, noting that the definition of software here must include some concept of both scope and quality, while cost must additionally be some function of how long it took to make it, etc. Since a rundown of programming productivity isn't the thrust of this post, we'll leave it at this simplistic overview and offer this instead: for LLMs, the measure of programming productivity is the time between “having the idea for a system” and “having working code that satisfies the idea”. Hopefully you can see in this the same basic measures of scope, quality, time, and cost.

So then if we're going to measure gains in productivity, we need to think about how fast something can go from being an idea (or specification, or requirement) to being ready for use by a user (deployed to production, released, merged to main).

Let me take a moment to outline the projects I had in mind and a quick assessment of their status. Some of these are new codebases, and some are not.

The projects

1. A DokuWiki quiz plugin that injects a quiz onto a page with simple syntax. It is similar to other plugins that didn't do exactly what I wanted them to do and had some baffling options. Started in April 2026. Iterations: 4? Status: acceptable.
2. A refactoring of the dlx-rest search and browse components to improve various interactions. Started in June 2025. Iterations: dozens. Status: largely acceptable after 6 months of remediation.
3. A refactoring of the dlx-rest record editor component to improve maintainability and reduce interaction issues. Started in March 2026. Iterations: dozens, plus restarts. Status: provisional.
4. An algorithm and web application to render the works of William Blake into a cybertext (in the Espen Aarseth sense) allowing recombinant narrative flow. Started in April 2026. Iterations: dozens. Status: largely failed.

I realize in looking at this list that I have unintentionally arranged them, not in chronological order, but in decreasing order of success.

The Quiz

The most successful of the projects, a DokuWiki quiz syntax plugin, was also the simplest to implement. In looking at the code that GitHub Copilot generated, the structure of a DokuWiki syntax plugin is quite minimal, which suggests to me that a) I could have done it myself in a few hours, most of which would have been spent learning by replicating an existing plugin; and b) not terribly much can go wrong with it. This is a case where I may or may not have bothered to make the plugin otherwise, and since I'm very rusty in PHP and not looking to expand my knowledge of it right now, I'm only invested in it to the extent it's useful for the project it was designed to complement, the Voces del Lunfardo site that my Digital Humanities praxis partner and I are working on.

The Search Interface

Moving down the list, I undertook a feverish refactoring of the main search interface for the Dag Hammarsköld Library's MARC Metadata Editor, mostly to change the screen interactions and simplify things a bit. The basic interface took a few weeks of plugging away with GitHub Copilot before leaving me with months worth of remedial work tracking down wonky and unintended behaviors. In all, that remediation lasted some six additional months. Unlike the PHP case, this is something I spend a nontrivial portion of my time working on, either developing it, fixing it, or simply keeping it running day to day. It pays for me to know what's in the code, so I can't just vibe it and hope for the best. And because I started with an intimate knowledge of the code, I was well positioned to evaluate the output, which I will note is voluminous and therefore it's difficult to conduct a line-by-line review. Success here is ambiguous.

The Record Editor

Next is a refactoring of the much more complicated record editor component in the MARC Metadata Editor. There are two main concerns with this code. First, because my team and I had yet to fully settle on Vue, it contains a labyrinth of nested control structures that perform DOM manipulation, including setting up and (hopefully) tearing down event listeners, etc. The second concern is that it's Vue 2, which is now quite dated (though functional!), creating a long-term maintenance issue. Now, the nature of this codebase is such that if I begin tugging on one thread, I must look in horror as myriad other threads move with it. It's no simple matter of surgically replacing the thing; it's integrated into other things, and most properly calls for a comprehensive review (read: tear it all down and start again from first principles). From that perspective, there can be little hope of outright success. And in fact, the numerous iterations that have gone into it so far speak to the difficulty of finding the right questions* that will allow adequate progress.

This is a good time to pause and talk about churn. If you've used LLMs for coding (or perhaps for other tasks), you may recognize that they sometimes, or maybe frequently, enter some sort of churn state, where the thing they're doing isn't so much incrementing progress toward your goal but is rather doing a lot of busywork in pursuit of some phantom goal the LLM made up based on its training data. “If you want,” it might say, “I can ...” followed by whatever scheme is statistically a plausible next step. Sometimes that next step actually makes sense. Often it looks sensible but will lead to numerous iterations aimed at optimizing something that it may take you a bit to understand is a red herring. This is churn. It's not doing anything specifically productive, but it sure is doing a lot of it, all at your expense, and it's taking up all day to do it.

There's no real way of escaping churn within the context of the “conversation” in which it occurs, and so the best recourse is to put a lid on it and start a new session from an uncontaminated branch. You are branching these changes, right? When people talk about how these products don't make you more productive, per se, but just intensify the process in something of an addictive* way, this is what they mean. The constant wrangling, back and forth with the LLM is intense, especially when you think the end of this development path is right beyond the horizon. So if you can just get there...

During this refactor, I realized I had entered a churn state while refactoring the refactor. You see, the code generated in the first refactor was still quite large and lightly monolithic. True, it was broken down into a handful of sensible components, as the sample component set had been. I thought it might make sense to reduce the size of some of those components as well, since there were some duplicative methods being chained together via communication buses between the components and their subcomponents. Additionally, I wanted (and still want) automated tests that express the functionality of the component set and can say something about whether new code breaks that functionality. You know, regression tests.

Several iterations in, I noticed that the LLM was spawning hundreds of lines of code per iteration, only some of which were new tests. In the process of refactoring, the LLM had invented a service layer to abstract and reuse some of the logic that was duplicated within the components. This seemed sensible at the time, but as this secondary codebase grew, I couldn't help but realize that what it was making was an entire vanilla JavaScript application full of things I had specifically chosen Vue to handle. In other words, it was reshaping the application to use a different architecture entirely, essentially replacing the neatly packaged calculator (Vue 3) I had intended to use with hand-written pages of calculations and tables. This diversion was costly in terms of both time and tokens.*

Presently, I have the skeleton of a working refactor that appears to do most of the things that were envisioned for it. But it encompasses some 10,000 lines of code that I have to review, and it undoubtedly introduces a host of new problems while leaving some very glaring problems in place (because they were out of scope). If I were able to get this into production within six months, I would be very surprised. In all likelihood, I will use the resulting structure as a learning opportunity as I conduct a the aforementioned “comprehensive review”, since there are other problems to address that are outside the scope of the record editor.

The Cybertext Machine

This is the least successful of the projects so far, and the main reason is that it is exploratory, with ill-defined inputs and outcomes. The ostensible goal was something I could see in my head but not express in specific enough terms for a LLM coding product: it is supposed to be an algorithm for chunking up the body of William Blake's complete works into a traversable graph based on line endings and all their possible next line starts, along with some kind of a branching choice web presentation system to afford user traversal. It's possible there is already an algorithm in existence for this (in which case feel free to shout it at me on the social networks I inhabit), but so far nailing one down so far has remained elusive. Meanwhile, the interface itself basically works, and always was the simplest aspect in most respects.

Since the underlying algorithm doesn't yield the correct graph structure, however, the interface working is sort of irrelevant. This is, so to speak, a decently built road that goes nowhere useful. There are scripts that parse the text successfully. There are scripts that load the text into JSON and even interface with a Kuzu store. There are query APIs for getting data back out, and there are data schemas and models and such. It's a full factory of gizmos and gadgets, and they all move in more or less the prescribed way, except that the algorithm they're using is incorrect.

The failure here is one that always would have been likely. I simply don't know enough about the domain in question (extracting the text to build the right graph shape) to proceed. That means I likely don't even know enough to ask the right questions, this LLM coding business has all the hallmarks of being oracular, which means that knowing what to ask and how to ask it (i.e., specificity) makes a difference.* Rather than accept the recommendations of the LLM, whose goal is to shovel whatever it can into this knowledge gap, whether it's appropriate or not, I chose to walk away from it and write this, and an academic essay, instead.

* The big old * in the room

Throughout, I've dropped in asterisks, which all point here. What this mode of working feels like is a slot machine. Dorian Taylor calls it a “slop-machine”, but then likens it to a pachinko game instead. You put (pour) in tokens and pull the lever to see what comes out the other side. The main difference is that sometimes the output looks like it might be useful. But what's coming out of the other end is essentially a worse kind of hot dog. It's made up of the stuff that went in, but you know it contains something unseemly in it. What you're hoping for when you pull the lever is that the output is not just useful, but that it solves the problem you were trying to articulate. When it doesn't, you rephrase, offer corrections, or rethink something, and then you reach for the tokens and the lever again, ad infinitum.

And there's the problem, of course. When I said this business had the hallmarks of being oracular, I meant that these LLMs occupy a place where they promise to help you turn your words into code, and that all you have to do is come to them with the right words, ask the right questions, and you'll get what you're seeking. What I've exhibited above is that this promise only bears out some of the time, enough to keep you coming back for more. On the whole, however, it's a losing proposition unless you're one of these LLM companies, though see below. The dopamine hit you get from scoring anything at all means it's primed to be addictive, which in turn means it entices you to use it even when you haven't got the question sorted out ahead of time.

As for the companies peddling these products, it's unclear what the end game is here. On the one hand, these models are expensive to operate, and the companies do so at a tremendous loss. LLMs are subsidized at a rate of around 90%, which means that customers right now are only paying 10% of the cost the companies would need to break even. While it's clear this is a market share land grab, suppose for a moment that these products can do all they're billed to be able to do. What then? What's left for people to do when all the jobs these corporations believe can be replaced are replaced? Are they planning to pay us all in company scrip? They don't seem to have a plan for that.

For now, the economy is beginning to take what looks like its final form: a massive series of casinos operated by a handful of oligarchs, designed with addiction and limits to individual ownership of anything in it. “AI” is just one more tool in this arsenal.

Conclusion

Where does that leave us? It leaves us basically with a set of tools that, at least for coding purposes, if you're specific enough in your description and are well equipped to evaluate the output, might be of some limited assistance. They're probably good enough to improve your documentation and might be able to help you write more tests than you would have had time for. But you have to know when enough is enough, and be prepared to admit when the LLM is just spinning its wheels for its own purposes, which aren't aligned with yours. Are they worth betting the farm on? I wouldn't.

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And from the fossil flame arose — eternal shame!

a second, lightless sun.

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I: A Demon Haunted World

Circa 1987 or 1988, Fairview, OK

I got some ocean front property in Arizona
From my front porch you can see the sea
I got some ocean front property in Arizona
If you'll buy that, I'll throw the Golden Gate in free

—George Strait

Somewhere between my 9th and 10th birthday, my family had moved to Fairview, Oklahoma, from nearby Isabella, Oklahoma. Google says it's a 12 minute drive between these towns. As a child, I think it felt like a longer drive. Given the 1995 repeal of federal speed limits, resulting in Oklahoma raising the speed limit on two lane highways to 65, I can be certain that this isn't simply an artifact of childhood memory and its dilation of time. I remember this particular move as having been the reason I got my first computer instead of the large GI Joe battleship my parents had promised me. They had consulted me and given me some choice, though it was a false one: we might not have room for the battleship in the new house, so wouldn't the computer make more sense? In any case I agreed. I got my computer, a Commodore 64C, and then we moved. I can't pretend to know why we moved, but then I rarely knew the reasons.

This wasn't our first move, of course, and it wasn't the last. Prior to this, I didn't have any special connection to Fairview, per se, though in looking at the geography I can see that it must have been a nexus while we lived in smaller towns around it. It remained so for a while after we left. I can remember, for instance, visiting the library there and checking out books, and I can remember earning Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas by reading. Though it had drawn us in for shopping and such, in most respects it was a place we lived for a bit before we moved on, which we did approximately every year, making my sister and me the perpetual new kids in school. That relative rootlessness also means my memory of places is fractured. The circumstances of our moves, which in some sense preserved both continuity of activity and contiguity of place do little to patch this fragmentation; rather, they provide anchors in memory that elide place and time entirely. Piecing together this distant past is therefore an exercise in sifting through disparate imagery and sensations to arrive at something coherent.

One of the things we had been doing during this time as well was church shopping. Oklahoma is pretty firmly in the Bible Belt, which means both that the vast majority of people attend church somewhere and that there are many denominations of evangelical Protestant churches to choose from, in addition to the other denominational options. Church life is so prevalent in this area of the country that as newcomers to any town you can expect your new neighbors to ask you where you go to church. In many cases, of course, these neighbors hoped you might say you didn't go to church, or you hadn't found one yet, so they could use it as an excuse to tell you about Jesus or, at the very least, invite you to their church. These days, looking back, I find it hard to believe that anyone who had spent more than a week in the area would be unaware of Jesus. The more forward of these folks would ask you straight up if you had accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. They had no compunction against putting people on the spot. This is, in fact, what the evangelical part of evangelical Protestantism is.

Within this vast sphere of the Bible Belt, however, there are nevertheless gradients of worship, and there is considerable variety among the denominations with their often minor doctrinal differences. I don't think there's a real consensus on just how many actual protestant denominations there are in the world. The highest figures are in the tens of thousands, but there are methodological concerns with these figures, namely that they're counting each country's denominations as separate denominations. The degree to which sociological and cultural factors attenuate doctrinal practice is perhaps debatable, but I suspect the monetary and governance structures that bind denominations internationally are more important. The National Catholic Register puts the estimate closer to 200 major protestant Christian denominations in the United States presently, and “historically and globally, [...] hundreds, likely thousands”. Non-denominational megachurches are also on the rise, representing some 40% of the nearly 1700 megachurches in the US.

Out in the sticks, in places like Isabella and Fairview and Cleo Springs (all places in Oklahoma I lived once), there are no megachurches. Or there weren't 30 years ago. Given the rural makeup of these towns, I doubt the situation has changed that much, except that plenty of churches are seeing declining membership, part of a nationwide trend. These reasons are relevant to this discussion, but not the focus, so for now I'll punt on this particular facet. Rural Oklahoma is punctuated with small churches often hewing to one of a handful of Protestant denominations. Some of these are evangelical, and some are mainline. Some are in fact Bible churches with no particular affiliation. During my youth, my family attended two denominations: Assemblies of God and the Church of the Nazarene. Later, in my adulthood, my father sought and obtained ordination in the Church of God, though as far as I can tell he's completely retired now.

For the most part, I'm not interested in attempting to litigate the differences in doctrine between these various denominations. They probably matter more to the congregants than to outsiders. Of the two denominations with which I am familiar, there is one difference between them I want to highlight, however, and that's the use of glossolalia, commonly known as speaking in tongues. The Assemblies of God are an umbrella for a range of Pentecostal churches, and among other things, Pentecostals are known for speaking in tongues. The Nazarene Church generally doesn't practice this, but considers such manifestations morally neutral.

While I lived in Fairview, my family attended the Assemblies of God church there. I have, seared into my memory since childhood, the unsettling image of people spontaneously vocalizing speech-like syllables in a more-or-less fluent-sounding manner, followed by someone else responding with an interpretation of this vocalization. Many of these memories are from evening services, which is part of another peculiarity of life in the Bible Belt: many of us attended church twice on Sunday (morning and evening) and once on Wednesday evening. These evening services were shorter and often featured testimonials wherein people shared how God had helped them overcome some struggle or other. At times, not limited to any specific service time, there would be laying on hands, intense emotional prayers, and always, always the extended musical segments. They also regularly featured speaking in tongues.

I won't lie: this remains among my most frightening memories of church life as a child. It is disorienting, to say the least, when someone begins shouting things you can't understand. And the act of interpretation made the little wheels in my head spin, though I was unsettled by the experience. This was a source of fright for me, but it paled next to the exorcisms. I can remember directly only one, and if there were others, they sort of meld together in the depths of my memory. Such occurrences were thankfully rare, but they made for titillating topics for hushed conversation. Demon possession was a terrifying thing to contemplate as a child, but it is emblematic of the Christian Right's certainty that the forces of Satan were arrayed against the believer, that the secular world was in Satan's grasp, and that only constant appeals to God through prayer could keep those forces at bay.

Summertime in the Bible Belt is like this: school is out, and we (my sister and I) faced the eternal twins of freedom and boredom. Some summers we could count on a trip to visit, maybe even stay with our grandparents for a bit in Amarillo, a constant star around which we orbited, however distantly. In almost all cases, however, there were a couple of church events to break up the summer. Vacation Bible School was a week-long event designed to couple crafts and other activities with the delivery of the Gospel, and it was aimed at kids. Teens in the church, those who hadn't already escaped on a vacation elsewhere, often pitched in, volunteering their time to help run the program. Since these attracted outsiders in their guise as free childcare, they were lower key advertisement vehicles for the churches that ran them, and I sort of imagine a knowing cadre of beleaguered parents enrolling in all the VBS programs in the area to gain respite for several weeks of the summer.

Beyond a certain age, though, we started attending church camps which, for a few years in our case, were in addition to VBS. Unlike VBS, a church camp is a sleep-away camp run for and by the church denominations. The Assemblies of God run their own camps, as does the Church of the Nazarene. I've attended both, though most of my memories are from the Nazarene camps. Even a good estimate of the number of church camps seems out of reach, but I think it's safe to offer an order of magnitude around a thousand. The goals of a church camp are similar to those of Vacation Bible School, but the change of scenery, longer programming, and increased intensity facilitate greater uptake in indoctrination.

At its most benign and superficial, such a camp is no different from a thousand other kinds of summer camps young people can attend. Summer camps create a universal set of conditions that break continuity, taking a young person out of their familiar surroundings and offering something different, sometimes transformational, humorous songs and TV shows notwithstanding. Church camps use this formula of discontinuity to amplify their particular brands of Biblical messaging through intense emotional appeal. This is a feature they share with retreats and revivals, which act as reset switches, energizing practitioners and shoring up their beliefs against Satan's predations. And almost every young person hits some sort of breaking point during the week.

It is evening, and we're at the last chapel service of the night. The chapel is an open-air pavilion, a permanent structure with just enough elemental protection to keep the instruments, the Peavey speakers, and the microphones from getting wet. Moths flutter around the fluorescent lights that snake along the beams overhead, and we're all crowded into benches or folding chairs facing the pulpit. It's the second or maybe even the first night of camp, and at some point during the many prayers and songs, perhaps during the dreaded, interminable altar call, we become aware of a commotion. A confusion of camp ministers bodily surrounds a young woman, a camper, over whom they pray with passionate fervor. Gloves off, so to speak, the worship service shifts focus to this end, and we gawp, eyes like full moons at what we're witnessing. The whispers fly, and we all know the score. She was possessed by a demon, we're told, and who are we to believe otherwise. Lucky for us we're among God's warriors, who can command such beings to flee, just as Jesus had done in the Gospel. After what seems a small eternity, the young woman is free of the demon, and the prayer warriors have prevailed (through the blood of Christ). She emerges from the grasp of the camp ministers, who sing God's praise, with tears of elation streaming down her cheeks.

Some of us who witnessed this will continue to interrogate these events, or our memories of them at least. Was this staged? I've seen enough people respond to altar calls and become “saved” or “born again” to know it probably wasn't. And I don't believe in literal demons, which leaves me with the unsettling opinion that the “demon” was an emotional break facilitated by the discontinuity of camp. It didn't need to be a literal demon for it to continue having an impact on me. This episode remains one of my most vivid memories of church life as a youth, but while nothing else quite approaches it in vividness or in terms of its ability to frighten, the circumstances that produced it permeated the culture in which I was raised.

I left home for good in 1997. While I like to think I could see what evangelical Protestantism was then, and what the Christian Right would become over the next couple of decades, the truth is I was blindly running away from it. At the time of publication I'm perhaps 20% done with Wild Faith, but so far I appreciate Lavin's ability to synthesize and contextualize these aspects into an explanatory apparatus. It may be hard for me to read, but as you can see, it certainly has prompted me to respond. I've numbered this entry in case I am inspired to write more. In any case, there is so much more I can say, but this will suffice for now.

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Solemn heave the Atlantic waves between the gloomy nations,
Swelling, belching from its deeps red clouds & raging Fires.
Albion is sick America faints! enrag'd the Zenith grew.
As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbed heaven
Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood
And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o'er the Atlantic sea;
Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge
Of iron heated in the furnace: his terrible limbs were fire
With myriads of cloudy terrors banners dark & towers
Surrounded; heat but not light went thro' the murky atmosphere

—William Blake, America A Prophecy

“And as we stand looking all at once comes the wash of another unseen ship, like a great wheel, the vast spokes of the wheel whirling across the bay —” —Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Spoilers ahead.

On January 23, 1933, as it had many times before, one of Mexico's most active volcanoes, Popocatépetl, erupted. Nearby Ixtaccíhuatl, its twin volcanic mountain, lay long dormant. El Popo, as it is known, has figured in Mexican folklore since pre-Columbian times. The Nahuas formed several myths and legends about the peaks, which intertwine their fates through the lenses of love and loss, but also recount Popocatépetl's many eruptions. In most of these legends, Popocatépetl is an angry warrior grieving the death of his lover. He is the active volcano, the smoking mountain, and she is the dormant volcano or the sleeping woman in Nahuatl parlance.

Six years and nine months later, on the Day of the Dead (herein November 2) 1939, Malcolm Lowry situates us beneath these storied peaks, in the town of Quauhnahuac, or Cuernavaca. The story opens with a conversation between M. Jacques Laruelle and Dr. Arturo Díaz Vigil. They are discussing their mutual friend? acquaintance? the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, who met with a tragic end the year before, as well as his wife Yvonne and his half-brother Hugh. Like all who experience or witness such tragedies, they trade their many incredulities and speculate about what they could have done to prevent it, even as other events in the world threaten to sweep away the memory.

At its root, Under the Volcano is a story of dichotomies, of irreconcilable duality. The characters map to one and then the other at various times, but always roiling beneath the surface is the (self) destructive urge of mann (or ᛗ), something akin to Eliot's shadow, what falls “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act”. A cloud hangs over our characters: each at war within themselves, and each at war with one another. Lowry takes us through each devastating moment throughout the course of that day to watch a tragedy unfold along a trajectory that is as unavoidable as it is historically contingent. At every turn these warring dualities hold a silent mirror to the dissolving world order in ways that remain relevant and resonant. Especially today.

Structurally, the work is beholden to Ulysses, with its focus on a singular day. Lowry's day is compressed into 12 hours, with each chapter covering roughly one hour. This is also a nod to Homer, Virgil, and Milton. Though dense, the prose itself falls at times into a metrical rhythm, and so we can best understand this as an epic poem in blank verse, a fever dream of stream-of-consciousness through the lens of alcohol, especially mescal. Except for a few solid strands, it isn't important to grasp the inundation of language and layers and meanings that tug at one another with cross-purposes. There is a plot, but we already know the end. Lowry's goal seems less to impart a coherent order of events than to lead the reader through the psychological state of a man who will surely die. Read it once to let the words wash over you. A subsequent re-read may reveal more.

The central character, around whom the others orbit, is the Consul. Geoffrey Firmin, whose British Consulate post has been abolished via a breakdown in diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Mexico, is and has long been an alcoholic by the time we meet him on November 2, 1938. This is the last day he will live. The weight of his choices presses in on him, and later in the day he prophesies his own death. “Ah, ignoratio elenchi,” he says during one of his final tirades. “Can't you see there's a sort of determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.” By this point Lowry has revealed through confusion, unsteadiness, and hallucinations that Geoffrey suffers from delirium tremens (DTs), often brought about by his attempts to refrain from alcohol. He knows and admits, while simultaneously denying, that he has a problem. His alcoholism must at least in part be responsible for the dissolution of his marriage with Yvonne, who seems to have sought comfort with M. Laruelle. She, in fact, had left him the year before only to return on this day to seek reconciliation. Geoffrey is the first and most fundamental dichotomy: there is sober Geoffrey, now long dormant, and there is drunk Geoffrey, self-destructively active.

Mirrored outwards, Geoffrey's relationships each with Yvonne, Hugh, M. Laruelle, and even Dr. Vigil are their own dichotomies. Yvonne/Geoffrey are the lover/loser, Hugh/Geoffrey are the idealist/cynic, Laruelle/Geoffrey represent the temperate/intemperate, and Vigil/Geoffrey represent health/illness. They are of course false dichotomies because there is, in Geoffrey's view, only one outcome in each. The tyranny of determinism has extinguished all other paths so that the only choice remaining is self-annihilation. Yvonne came back, but she will leave again, because Geoffrey will drive her away. Hugh will if necessary die for his ideals while Geoffrey will die for his lack of them. And Geoffrey has cut himself off from the possibility of either temperance or health. The fault lines are already under strain, and the volcanic forces within him will permit no other end. He will erupt.

But there are other dichotomous mirrors here. The Consul, in his official capacity, had been a representative of the United Kingdom in Mexico. In 1938, when Lázaro Cárdenas ordered the expropriation of all oil companies in Mexico, the United Kingdom suspended diplomatic relations, leaving Geoffrey jobless if he were to remain in Mexico. Similarly, the situation in Europe was deteriorating. That same year the Second Spanish Republic launched an offensive from Ebro against the forces of the Spanish State under Franco, which it would eventually lose. Hitler's Anschluss and pressed claims on the Sudetenland also presaged the coming storm, much of which was in full force by the opening of the novel in 1939. The eruption in Europe had already begun.

Geoffrey Firmin's last hour takes place in a bar, the Farolito. This we have come to expect. He has fully capitulated to his addiction, and he knows with the foresight of self-fulfilling prophecy that Yvonne will not come back to him. It is still the Day of the Dead, a fact that had remained in the background for much of the novel. But as the Fiesta moves from graveside processions to the bars, the Farolito fills up with revelers, including several public officials who begin to suspect him of being a thief, a murderer, a Jew, a spy, and/or an American. His permanently drunken state leaves him ill equipped to fend off any such accusations. His drunken ramblings speculating on the fate of the Indigenous man who died outside El Amor de los Amores on the way to Tomalín either implicate him or the policeman.

Lowry presents, through prose that is dense, cerebral, and at times delirious, an acute documentary of the decline and fall of a man in the specific, and of ᛗ writ large. Painted against the backdrop of the looming Second World War, the parallels are stark. Historians have offered multiple causes for the War. Lowry offers this singular, metaphorical collapse, which amalgamates most or all of those causes and spearpoints them into one man. It is as good a starting place as any. This is no Christ, but he will suffer for the sins of the world nonetheless, and rather than spare us the same misfortune, when he inevitably erupts, Geoffrey Firmin will take us down with him. In Geoffrey's death, we have our final dichotomy: Christ/Antichrist. Caught out in a lie, bearing papers that apparently belong to Hugh, one of the officials present in the bar, the Chief of Rostrums, admonishes him, “Wrider? You antichrista. Si, you antichrista prik.”

We can't be certain what happened to Yvonne and Hugh. Yvonne's final chapter appears to lead to her death as well. Hugh had intended to travel on to Spain to fight with the Republicans, but Lowry leaves us with no closure there either. It is likely, given the theme, that Geoffrey Firmin's death did, indeed, destroy those close to him, like an eruption of Popocatépetl. Laruelle and Vigil have escaped the damage. In the larger panoply, of course we know that some will escape and others will not. But even those who do escape must confront the ruin left behind.

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I would suggest the primary path is neutrality. Oh, it doesn't start there, of course. Negations nip at the fringes of the social fabric, slipping into serious clothing when they can to appear legitimate, driven by a collection of grievances they can wield against their opponents. But the moment they wear the mask of legitimacy, the politically neutral stance practiced by news media, for instance, elevates them and invites them into the mainstream. In part this is because the tenets of neutrality are a nothing, a nihil.

Neutrality isn't the same thing as centrism. Centrism attempts to sit in the middle of the bell curve, rejecting ideologies at either end of any particular political spectrum. That it can only do so within the bounds of the Overton window means that it also can be pushed and pulled, however slowly, by winds of discourse, so that what is centrist here and now isn't what may be centrist elsewhere and elsewhen. More pragmatically, however, centrism attempts to identify and guard against extreme ideologies, doing so from within the frame itself. It often succeeds in this, perhaps too well if you happen to hew to ideologies further to the left or right of the current mainstream.

But neutrality attempts to sit outside the frame entirely, propped up by a fervent belief or hope that the right combination of ritual language and public action are sufficient to maintain institutional legitimacy. Neutrality does not even allow the identification of extreme ideologies, because the act of doing so requires passing judgment, which the adherents of neutrality must avoid at all costs. Thus institutions mired in neutrality must treat all ideologies as on equal footing, regardless of the circumstances in which they arise. In this way, neutral institutions cannot help but allow negations to enter the mainstream, since doing otherwise would threaten their own sense of legitimacy. At best, when neutral institutions reinforce the status quo, they can operate with a minimum of cognitive dissonance. At worst, they are, in fact, participating in their own destruction.

Let's not pretend, however, that neutrality is either irrational or or powerless. Neutral institutions understand that their continued existence depends on not making overt enemies of the power players around them. Neutrality in that light is rational, since it's a survival mechanism. Similarly, neutral institutions wield considerable soft power. In the case of news media, this is through influence. In the case of other organizations it might look more like moral weight or just as a forum for political interchange through which others exercise their power and influence.

But crucially we must also not pretend that neutrality is actually neutral. Choice of language, choice of institutional focus, choice of response to changing circumstance, and other biases make neutrality an aspirational goal, an ideal. Therefore its only remit is power for the sake of it, cloaked in its own circular definition to distract from the idea that within, it is nothing.

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In my wayward youth, I practically lived at the library, picking up stacks of books to take home and devour. By the time I reached my teens, those books got bigger, and in many cases, more mature than what we would normally consider young adult fiction, or whatever. Cue the irony of having parents who strictly forbade Stephen King from my reading list on the basis of a sensationalized understanding of his work, but had no clue about the contents of the comparatively under-publicized works I consumed instead.

In search of fantasy series in my early teens, I stumbled on the works of Stephen R. Donaldson, specifically The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Like everything else I was reading at the time, I read every book of the series I could get my hands on, as well as other works I could find by the author. In the early 90s, the Thomas Covenant series comprised six books across two trilogies. Donaldson revived the series in 2004 with The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but by then I had long lost interest in the singularly unlikable protagonist.

Which brings me to the thing I remember most about the series: Thomas Covenant had remained in my mind among the worst protagonists in the history of SF/F. Since this is a bold assertion, I had wondered if Covenant was worth revisiting. So late in 2024, almost on a whim, I checked out an e-book copy of Lord Foul's Bane from the New York Public Library. Frustratingly, I failed to finish it before it was due, and am waiting to check it back out, but while I was reading it, I took public notes on it, which were on my Mastodon site.

What follows is an expanded version of this thread, aiming for an answer to a single question: What effect, if any, does 30 years between readings have on my view of Covenant as a protagonist?

There are spoilers ahead.

Additionally: content warning – sexual assault.

Thomas Covenant is a character whose view of the world has been profoundly shaken by his contraction of leprosy, an ancient disease characterized by its telltale deterioration of the body. As someone who grew up in Bible Belt America, leprosy was a familiar Biblical trope. I was aware via the Bible of how the societies described in the Gospels exiled lepers to colonies on the edge of town, proclaiming them unclean. I also understood at the time that leprosy was incurable, so it wasn't a stretch of my imagination to see a protagonist presented in the Biblical sense of leprosy. My understanding was wrong, however, even if Donaldson's presentation still made at least some narrative sense. So the first thing to do is to quickly review what we know now of leprosy.

Leprosy, aka Hansen's Disease, is caused by Mycobaterium leprae and Mycobaterium lepromatosis. M. leprae was discovered by the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen in 1873, while M. lepromatosis was discovered in 2008 (attributed to Han, et al.) Its effects include damage to nerves, the respiratory tract, eyes, and skin. The nerve damage can cause pain insensitivity leading to loss of extremities though infection and injury. In short, this is a disease with many visibly pronounced symptoms that are unmistakable, and which cause bodily deterioration. It is transmitted from person to person via extensive (but not incidental) contact, though this distinction hardly matters in a historical view, given the fear with which lepers were regarded.

This is probably a good time to interject with one of the unfortunate aspects of history as conveyed through the literature of the time. As a progressive skin disease, what we call leprosy today is just one of the possible skin diseases described by ancient texts and classified under the same name. So needless to say our modern understanding of leprosy doesn't cleanly map to an ancient understanding. Even so, the idea of a communicable skin disease that forced people into social exile is resonant, whatever it was or should have been called.

I'm not going to go into an extensive history of treatment, but by the 60s and 70s, multi-drug therapies (MDT) had shown high efficacy in treating the disease, settling in 1981 on the current MDT. Writing in the mid-70s, Donaldson may not have had all of this information at his fingertips. Had he started this series even a decade later, the situation would have been markedly different. That leaves us with a Covenant that, at the time of publication, believes himself to be incurable, forced to rearrange his life to accommodate his disease, performing regular visual inspections (VSE), and finds himself abandoned by his wife and ostracized from his small town community.

So this is the context for how we encounter Covenant, attempting to hold on to any last shred of human connection in a world that is systematically shutting him out. He is bitter, and rightly so. Not only has his wife left him and taken their son with her, the people in his small town have taken to having groceries delivered to him and paying his bills in advance specifically so he won't have any reason to come into town. They have weaponized generosity. In other circumstances, this sort of mutual aid would be commendable. After all, unless he can continue writing or find some other remote work occupation (sound familiar?), Covenant is unable to work and would, today, qualify for whatever total disability benefits his state offered. Which themselves aren't much, by design, and include long and arduous application processes, sometimes requiring a lawyer (ask me how I know). But applied this way, they are less “mutual aid” and more “pay to keep the leper in the leper colony”, even though that means enforced solitude. The leprosy itself is a narrative fix, something that only matters to hang the rest of the narrative on and justify the corner into which Donaldson has painted his protagonist.

It is during one of Covenant's trips into town, where he is attempting to pay his bills for himself, that he becomes the protagonist of a portal fantasy (or the similar concept, isekai). In a portal fantasy, the protagonist is someone from “our” world, transported to some other world, usually to accomplish some kind of Hero's Journey. It's important that the protagonist be someone the reader can relate to in some way, because their “everyman” character is in some ways a reader stand-in. In 70s fantasy fiction, this character usually was a man or, if the target age was younger, a boy or young man. That's a subject of litigation elsewhere, so I won't dwell on it here, but suffice it to say that we as readers are supposed to identify with the protagonist of a portal fantasy.

(Aside: While reading the Wikipedia entry for isekai, trying to find any notable differences between isekai and portal fantasy, I was amused to find that one common isekai trope is for the protagonist to die being hit by a car or truck, then reincarnate in the new world.)

Covenant traverses his portal by being hit by a police car. He suggests the policeman was targeting him, because by this point in the novel he suspects everyone of wishing him ill. This mentality colors every interaction he has with other people, because he's always expecting the shoe to drop. In any case, he “travels” after a cryptic conversation with a street beggar, waking in some kind of liminal space where Lord Foul confronts him to lay out the stakes: deliver a message to the Lords' Council spelling the end of the world in a matter of years. He shows that a creature named Drool possesses an item called The Staff of Law, and indicates that Covenant possesses power via his white gold wedding ring, but that he will not be able to master it in time. And then Foul casts Covenant out to land upon a high rock called Kevin's Watch. From this point, Covenant is fully in the new world.

There, atop the 500 foot spire, on a flat stone above a plain, a disoriented Covenant tries to make sense of his new surroundings, and there he meets his first inhabitant of this world, Lena, who hails from nearby Mithil Stonedown. It is at this point that Covenant begins his negotiation with this new reality. Is it a dream? Something else? He convinces himself it's a dream, because what else could it be? And this is something my teenage self maybe didn't appreciate as much. What would I really do if I awoke in a strange world? Would I believe it? Or would I deny it as Covenant does?

Everything that follows is cast in doubt as a potential product of Covenant's comatose mind. Because he can't conceive of this world as being real, neither can he conceive of any consequences for actions he takes within the world. He acts miserably, execrably, lashing out at the people of the Land, justifying his actions as necessary for him to retain control of his mind, which he fears will be lost if he succumbs to the place and accepts it as something other than a dreaming figment. It is in this state that he rapes Lena prior to setting off in the company of her unsuspecting mother.

When an author has presumably limited space and scope to tell a story, those limits impose a sort of narrative efficiency. The most charitable way to interpret this vis-à-vis the rape of a teenager at the hands of the (early middle-age?) protagonist is that Donaldson thought it added something necessary to the story. So far, I can't see what that is. Does Covenant come to regret it? Yes, eventually. But where I can be sympathetic to a man bereft of society and cursed to die slowly, this act greatly diminishes my sympathy. It doesn't even really matter if Covenant believed it was real or a dream.

At every turn, Covenant is resistant not only to the reality of the world presented to him, but also to the role that this world is thrusting upon him. In some ways, this is typical of portal fantasy, where the Chosen One must overcome initial doubt. I don't think we ever in the series get a clearly confident Covenant, one who has overcome that doubt. He grates against the role continually, and for what to my adult mind seem like rational reasons: this kind of heroism is best watched on screen, as something one reads about in books, or as something one plays out with dice and character sheets. Covenant is no easy hero, and since we know he's a wretch on top of being bitter and cynical, we don't get our heroic stand-in to allow us to feel similarly heroic.

I'll part with a brief meditation on what Donaldson might be doing here. Bearing in mind for a moment that an entire Fandom site dedicated to this 48 year old work, I haven't read any of it and am approaching this armed only with what I had previously read and the supplemental material about leprosy. Assuming the Land is all a figment of Covenant's sleeping mind, this reluctant Hero's Journey seems calculated to provide Covenant with additional resolve. He is, after all, confronted with an impossibility, much the same in his view of the leprosy diagnosis. It's an impossibility suddenly manifest, and he must negotiate with it or let it destroy him. In this light, Covenant is not our hero of the Land, Berek Half-Hand reincarnated. He is just a broken man grappling with the impossibility of his life.

Does that rehabilitate him in my mind? Well, in the waffling parlance of our time: it's complicated.

Further Reading

• Wikipedia: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
• Wikipedia: Leprosy
• Wikipedia: Hero's Journey
• Portal Fantasy and Isekai – What Are They?
• Thomas Covenant on Unbeliever Fandom

And tangentially related, because Covenant does seem to grasp the cost of heroism:

• A Hero Is Another Kind of Monster

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Anyway, if you have bookmarks that broke, my apologies. And if you see weird formatting and links that should lead somewhere else on the blog, but don't, just know that I am getting to them when I can.

And meanwhile, my feed URL has changed: https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

What I'm not fixing: 1) Every dead link and embed. This is, alas, the nature of the Web. 2) Grammar and spelling errors in old posts. They've been there that long.

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1. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
2. Whale by Cheon Myong-kwan, translated by Chi-Young Kim
3. The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
4. (Abandoned) En Agosto Nos Vemos by Gabriel García Márquez
5. The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
6. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
7. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
8. Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
9. (Abandoned) Gloriana, or, The unfulfill'd queen : being a romance by Michael Moorcock
10. The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali, translated by Kareem Abdulrahman
11. Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson
12. Diplomatics: The Science of Reading Medieval Documents – A Handbook by Federico Gallo

I have sort of resolved to read down my pile of Archipelago Books, and am looking at a few standouts published in 2024. I also have in mind to read a bit more nonfiction, which I had almost completely abandoned. As usual, however, we'll see.

#reading #books

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It is important, even vital, for the principled technocrats and technologists to maintain their skepticism in the face of the growing “AI” threat, even to the point being and acting as the opposition. And yet we are losing. We probably will lose. “AI” is the populist demagogue of technology, singing a siren song of promises to fix what's broken. And people are listening.

We imagine ourselves, perhaps, as treading in the bloody footprints of Ned Ludd, ready at a moment's notice to smash these new looms that weave “information” from the pilfered fibers of the Internet. We smugly point out that the Luddites were right to fear the fruits of automation, and right to stand against them. But we can be right and still find ourselves in a rearguard battle as a hydra of misinformation closes off any hope of escape.

Unlike the Luddites, however, we have put ourselves here, because as technocrats and technologists, we have failed our users. What they want are tools to make their lives easier, to help them process increasing workloads efficiently, ultimately to better serve their users, as they imagine it. We have, of course, endeavored to deliver these tools, and we've developed ever more baroque and at times ideological rituals in our quest to deliver them. Through our mantras of user stories and agile development (that usually isn't agile at all), and our adherence to the the false religions of project management and performance management, we've anesthetized ourselves into gating off useful technologies.

And our users? They are discovering that ready access to “AI”, at least in its current LLM incarnation, a planet-devouring Ouroboros with a silver tongue and a penchant for just making shit up, offers a way past the wizened gates of the tehcnologists and technocrats, who are busy salting runes on the floors of their offices in the hopes of staving off project failure.

Users are voting. They will seek out and use these tools, which they know to be deeply flawed and probably dangerous, because these flawed and dangerous tools possess a different set of flaws and dangers from those of the technology gatekeepers. We've told them in the past that change is good, that change is inevitable, and that change means progress. Or some of us have, anyway, and our users have internalized this message. They will seize these tools and attempt to beat us at our own game. Since there are more of them than there are of us, they will likely succeed, if not on quality, then on strength of numbers alone.

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