My microphone finally arrived. Here’s a raw version of the first Unsong chapter as a test, pure voice with no music.
I will continue if there’s any point to it.
Maybe you should team up with http://unsong.libsyn.com/ ?
More you might like
“billions of human beings suffering unbearable pain for all eternity”
okay now i’m confused bc unsong seems pretty based on jewish stuff so far but this is very christian, isn’t it? like, i thought you could only spend 11 months in hell according to jewish stuff
Yeah, it bugged me as well. Unsong’s as Christian as it is Jewish.
I got into some… arguments… about that… in the comments section. Scott yelled at me a bit after I got a little really angry/accusatory.
He later makes it explicit that it’s a monotheistic, but very different from either Jewish or Christian, theology.
It’s more complicated than this.
The very early Biblical Jews seemed to have a really vague concept of maybe there being a placed called Sheol under the earth where the souls of the dead hung out. It seems a lot like Greek Hades (and in fact is translated as Hades in some sources) in that it’s not particularly bad, just dead and lifeless and hopeless. The Bible is very quiet about this and it’s unclear to what degree some other Biblical concept called “Sheol” was influenced by Greek conceptions of Hades during the Hellenistic Age.
At some point, probably under the influence of Greek and Christian stuff, this transformed into the belief in the Olam Ha-Ba (“the world to come”, a good afterlife) and Gehenna (a bad afterlife of punishment). The Talmud says punishment in Gehenna is usually twelve months at most, after which the soul goes to Olam Ha-Ba. But this isn’t absolute and there are a couple of sources that suggest otherwise.
First of all, the Talmud itself clarifies that there are some punishments that involve having “no share in the world to come”, including “heresy, publicly shaming someone, committing adultery with a married woman and rejecting the words of the Torah”. It’s unclear how strictly this is defined, but, like, “publicly shaming someone” alone catches nine-tenths of Tumblr. I think there’s controversy as to whether these people stay in Gehenna forever or disappear into oblivion at the end of their twelve months.
Second, there are some Biblical and apocryphal sources suggesting eternal punishment. The Book of Daniel says that “multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt”, but the Book of Daniel says lots of things and is pretty weird and metaphorical. The Book of Judith (apocryphal, but apocryphal Jewish rather than apocryphal Christian) says that “The Lord, the Almighty, will punish them on the Day of Judgment by putting fire and worms into their flesh, so that they cry out with pain unto all eternity”.
And third, the New Testament itself provides some evidence that Hell was considered eternal during its time. This is what Jesus keeps telling people, and remember that Jesus was working within the Judaism of the time. Jesus’ sermons are framed as reminders (“You already know that Hell is eternal, so don’t go there”) not as didactics (“You might think sinners only go to hell for twelve months, but I’m telling you it’s eternal”).
So there was a common strain of Jewish thought during the Second Temple period (ie the time of Jesus) saying that punishment in Hell might be eternal. That strain ended up in Christianity, and a different strain ended up in modern Judaism (mostly). On the other hand, since Jews lived among Christians for a long time, a lot of Christian beliefs ended up reinfecting Judaism in the same way some modern American Jews end up with Hanukkah bushes. I’ve mentioned before this Hasidic story, where a kabbalist almost sells his soul to a very Christian Devil who wants him in Hell for all eternity. And Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews has a part which is basically Dante’s Inferno with Moses in place of Dante (CTRL+F “Moses visits Paradise and Hell at this link)
So yes, Unsong is a mishmash of Jewish and Christian beliefs, but no more than Judaism and Christianity themselves are both mishmashes of Jewish and Christian beliefs.
One chapter of Unsong describes a “lost” book of the Bible called Jezuboad which the angels “forgot” to give humanity. An Israelite man named Jezuboad complains that he’s very learned in Torah, but it’s too obscure and full of contradictions, and can God just explain the Divine Plan clearly in plain language? The archangel Uriel appears and says “OKAY, LET ME CLEAR UP ALL OF THIS CONFUSION RIGHT NOW, SO NOBODY ELSE HAS TO WORRY ABOUT IT…” and then the chapter ends, with the implication that the loss of this book is why religion is so confusing.
I didn’t realize this at the time, but this is actually really similar to an actual apocryphal book of the Bible, 2 Esdras. It failed to make it into the Western Bible, but it was preserved as canon by the Ethiopian Church, and a couple of Latin manuscripts of it have survived to the present day.
In the book, the prophet Ezra (the man who rewrote the Bible after it was lost during the Exile) says that despite all his wisdom he still doesn’t understand the divine plan, and asks God to explain a lot of things, especially why bad things happen to good people. The archangel Uriel appears before Ezra and says that that the human mind can’t comprehend God’s ways and so his questions can’t be answered.
I didn’t know any of this when I wrote about Jezuboad, and it’s pretty neat. If you’re interested, the text is available at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=3652195. The relevant part starts at 4 Ezra 3.
UNSONG: An epic corporatepunk tale of Jewish apocrypha that exists entirely to set up the most bullshit puns you’ve seen in your life.
One of the most fun parts of writing Unsong is seeing things come together that I didn’t intend. And so far the most impressive such “coincidence” has been Malia Ngo’s backstory. I usually don’t like revealing too much of where I’m coming from, but this one is too good not to share.
(spoilers ahead for Chapter 65)
diffractor asked:
In Unsong, the first three klipot are intact. We've already seen Thamiel, so will Chaigidel and Sathariel make an appearance at some point?
I’m going to avoid answering questions of the form “Does X show up in Unsong” because it’s potentially too much of a spoiler.
A post about Unsong, for any SSC readers who follow this mask here but not that mask there.
Huh. I feel like we’re completely missing each other in some way.
I wouldn’t quite describe the point of Unsong as “art interpretation is stupid and you shouldn’t do it”. I don’t really like somebody pinning me down and demanding I give the exact moral, since I don’t think books should be about an easily verbalized lesson, but if you’re going to put words in my mouth otherwise, then fine.
The first thing it’s about is just that pattern-matching is cool and fun and itself a form of art. There is no art form of “create the best conspiracy theory”, but I think there should be. I think writing that part about American Pie was fun, that reading somebody else doing something like that is fun, and that it’s something that should be more permissible. I play the same game at http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152824927151/slatestarscratchpad-slatestarscratchpad .
The second thing it’s about is the act of finding meaning in the world. I feel like a richly connected world is somehow more meaningful. George Washington wasn’t *just* crossing the Delaware to fight the British, he was reenacting Moses crossing the Red Sea, and I’m sure there are other similarities to Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and you get this feeling of the world being one big coherent whole, where anything you do in your life could come from the same strand of Adam Kadmon and exist necessarily as a mirror of Washington’s Delaware-crossing. This is hard for me to gesture at, which is why I wrote a book instead of trying to gesture. But I hope that some people understand what I mean when they read the book.
And the third thing it’s about is, I think, the thing you’re pointing towards. It’s an attempt to vaccinate people against apophenia in truth-apt domains. I gave the example of an Atlantean conspiracy theory in Part 17 of my Trump post. I used it because, when I was young, I used to believe in those theories on exactly the sort of evidence I gave there. Teaching myself not to do that was a really hard process that involved internalizing the degree to which an intelligent person could produce a seemingly-overwhelming series of coincidences on demand to support any point they wanted. If one day someone looks at a theory and says “That looks convincing, but not really any more convincing than Aaron’s theory about ‘There’s A Hole In My Bucket,’ and I know Scott made that up for laughs, so maybe this is also made up,” then I’ve done my job.
So it’s not about saying you can’t interpret art. Go ahead and interpret art. But have fun when you’re doing it. And don’t try to do science the same way.
Also, I feel like your complaint about how American Pie really is about religion doesn’t relate to the book. Obviously it uses a lot of religious references (eg ”Father, Son, and Holy Ghost”), and obviously that became grist for the mill. Equally obviously, the idea that James Dean is a reference to James the Just, or that the pink carnation is a reference to the Incarnation, is just silly. There’s no reason to lump both sorts of references together, except to have fun in exactly the way I was doing.
Anonymous asked:
is it cool if i start posting on Less Wrong and expounding on UNSONG like it's a religious text? (sort of like what you did to 'There's a Hole in My Bucket' in Interlude ו). i kind of don't want to accidentally make you into a religious figure without your consent.
I don’t think Less Wrong would be an appropriate place for this. If you really want to do it, maybe /r/unsong or /r/slatestarcodex.
I’m enjoying Unsong quite a bit, but I have to say its quality of, for lack of a better term, deliberate nerdsnipery turns me off some. I’m fine when catching some subtle reference or figuring out a narratively significant fact from little clues acts as a little extra whipped cream on an otherwise delicious literary sundae, but Unsong feels set up to make trying to solve all the mysteries, catch all the hints, and disambiguate all the references a central component of the reading experience (a feeling confirmed by the fandom I’ve seen in the comments and tumblr posts here and there).
I’ve never really liked riddles. They’re artificial in ways that make them significantly different both from intellectual problem solving when no other agents are involved and from genuine interactions with a possibly untrustworthy agent. The trickery with words, phrasing that would absolutely be considered lying in normal contexts and is obviously intended to give the wrong impression while remaining technically true, the deliberate obfuscation of certain relevant facts to make the task hard enough combined with the deliberate revelation to make the task possible, and the general sense that a good riddle is one that makes both the riddler and the successful riddled feel particularly clever (and possibly a little subversive/smart-assed?) combine to make a game I just don’t want to play. It feels like an archetypal arms race: riddlers and riddled develop more and more sophisticated tricks, frameworks, etc. that don’t help with anything but winning the game. And there’s something off-putting to me personally about temporarily treating friends and loved ones as untrustworthy/to be outsmarted (I similarly don’t like games with bluffing).
This is a hugely personal preference, of course. There’s not anything wrong with liking riddles. It just means certain things are not for me. And there’s enough of a story enjoyable on other terms in Unsong for me. But I wish this aspect were toned down some.
Part of this is just that I have trouble resisting a stupid joke, even when it’s in a dead language and requires five layers of background knowledge to make sense. Then people who don’t have the five layers of background knowledge think it’s a Deep Mystery and spend a lot of time unraveling it, only to be rewarded with a stupid joke at the end. I admit that my love of in-jokes is annoying and I apologize.
But part of it is also supposed to be something deeper (warning: this next part will be hopelessly pretentious). In the same way that Northern Caves had a theme of texts that are difficult to understand, I want Unsong to have a theme of texts that are way too easy to understand - in other words, pattern-matching, pareidolia, seeing a million connections but not being sure any of them are really there. The book’s central metaphor for this is kabbalists studying the Bible, but I want the book itself to channel that same feeling in a non-metaphorical way.
So for example, in Chapter 5 Ana uses this metaphor of goodness as music and evil as a discordant opposite of music. It’s easy enough to tie this into the book’s use of “singers” who sing the Names of God vs. UNSONG the United Nations Subcommittee On Names of God who try to stop them. But then the connections multiply. The title page quotes Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which does have a verse on Names of God - but which also refers to God as “Lord of Song”. The interlude references Peter Singer as the in-world archetype of good. Its morally ambiguous main character has the last name “Teller”, which seems clearly juxtaposed to Singer as if it’s someone who is working at something similar but missing the beauty and finesse - but then the book says that it derives from Edward Teller, who invented the H-bomb and almost caused the apocalypse. But then maybe that’s also a smokescreen and he’s just called “Teller” because he’s the narrator of the story. But then the book also talks about how he works as a literal (bank) teller at Cash For Gold and how this is a metaphor for kabbalah because he’s “freely interchanging symbols with material reality”. And also, a smith is someone who forges things and “tellus” as in “tellurium” is Latin for “Earth”, so Smith-Teller is someone who remakes the world. (There are other things in this space too, but I won’t spoil them.)
And at some point you realize I can’t possibly have intended all of these meanings, because most of this stuff is in reality and not in the book at all and I don’t have enough degrees of freedom to make it work. I can control the name of the in-book organization UNSONG (although even there, “United Nations Subcommittee On Names of God” is by far the most logical thing to call the thing that it is, so can that really be counted as authorial meddling?), but I can’t control Peter Singer’s name, or Edward Teller’s name, or what a bank teller is, and some of these things *have to* be coincidences, and then you either go full skeptic and start questioning whether your pattern-matching ability even works at all, or full kabbalist and assume all patterns are significant, even the ones in the real world which don’t make sense in a rational framework.
When there are little hints of solveable mysteries in the text, I don’t intend it to be some sort of stupid battle of wits in which I try to misdirect my readers - in fact, I’m curious what exactly you see that seems like that, since I’ve tried specifically to avoid that kind of thing. I intend it to be the beginning of a rabbit hole that can be followed arbitrarily far without a predetermined end, until eventually it even goes out of the text itself.
“billions of human beings suffering unbearable pain for all eternity”
okay now i’m confused bc unsong seems pretty based on jewish stuff so far but this is very christian, isn’t it? like, i thought you could only spend 11 months in hell according to jewish stuff
Yeah, it bugged me as well. Unsong’s as Christian as it is Jewish.
I got into some… arguments… about that… in the comments section. Scott yelled at me a bit after I got a little really angry/accusatory.
He later makes it explicit that it’s a monotheistic, but very different from either Jewish or Christian, theology.
It’s more complicated than this.
The very early Biblical Jews seemed to have a really vague concept of maybe there being a placed called Sheol under the earth where the souls of the dead hung out. It seems a lot like Greek Hades (and in fact is translated as Hades in some sources) in that it’s not particularly bad, just dead and lifeless and hopeless. The Bible is very quiet about this and it’s unclear to what degree some other Biblical concept called “Sheol” was influenced by Greek conceptions of Hades during the Hellenistic Age.
At some point, probably under the influence of Greek and Christian stuff, this transformed into the belief in the Olam Ha-Ba (“the world to come”, a good afterlife) and Gehenna (a bad afterlife of punishment). The Talmud says punishment in Gehenna is usually twelve months at most, after which the soul goes to Olam Ha-Ba. But this isn’t absolute and there are a couple of sources that suggest otherwise.
First of all, the Talmud itself clarifies that there are some punishments that involve having “no share in the world to come”, including “heresy, publicly shaming someone, committing adultery with a married woman and rejecting the words of the Torah”. It’s unclear how strictly this is defined, but, like, “publicly shaming someone” alone catches nine-tenths of Tumblr. I think there’s controversy as to whether these people stay in Gehenna forever or disappear into oblivion at the end of their twelve months.
Second, there are some Biblical and apocryphal sources suggesting eternal punishment. The Book of Daniel says that “multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt”, but the Book of Daniel says lots of things and is pretty weird and metaphorical. The Book of Judith (apocryphal, but apocryphal Jewish rather than apocryphal Christian) says that “The Lord, the Almighty, will punish them on the Day of Judgment by putting fire and worms into their flesh, so that they cry out with pain unto all eternity”.
And third, the New Testament itself provides some evidence that Hell was considered eternal during its time. This is what Jesus keeps telling people, and remember that Jesus was working within the Judaism of the time. Jesus’ sermons are framed as reminders (“You already know that Hell is eternal, so don’t go there”) not as didactics (“You might think sinners only go to hell for twelve months, but I’m telling you it’s eternal”).
So there was a common strain of Jewish thought during the Second Temple period (ie the time of Jesus) saying that punishment in Hell might be eternal. That strain ended up in Christianity, and a different strain ended up in modern Judaism (mostly). On the other hand, since Jews lived among Christians for a long time, a lot of Christian beliefs ended up reinfecting Judaism in the same way some modern American Jews end up with Hanukkah bushes. I’ve mentioned before this Hasidic story, where a kabbalist almost sells his soul to a very Christian Devil who wants him in Hell for all eternity. And Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews has a part which is basically Dante’s Inferno with Moses in place of Dante (CTRL+F “Moses visits Paradise and Hell at this link)
So yes, Unsong is a mishmash of Jewish and Christian beliefs, but no more than Judaism and Christianity themselves are both mishmashes of Jewish and Christian beliefs.
Yeah, it’s worth keeping in mind that Judaism is a very wide-ranging and diverse religious tradition. Modern rabbinic Judaism doesn’t think much of the idea of hell, but there are exceptions even there (@femmeprince can tell you a lot more about that than I can). One can argue that this is not authentic or legitimate Judaism, and certainly many adherents of mainstream Judaism would say so; I don’t really see it as my place to say one way or the other.
There were definitely historical Jewish sects that believed in eternal punishment; as Scott says, that’s most of where the early Christians got the idea. The Book of Watchers (the oldest part of the pseudepigraphic Book of Enoch), dated to around 300 BC (older than some portions of the canonical Tanakh) focused a great deal on a version of Sheol that looked a lot like the Greek Tartarus or the later Christian Hell, as well as being the main source of the idea of demons as fallen angels in Christianity. (It’s also the earliest known use of “Son of Man” as the name for a divine/eschatological figure, and probably the origin of the figure of the Metatron in Judaism.) There’s also some treatment of damnation in the more apocalyptic texts from the Qumran community, like the War Scroll. And once you get to the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, contemporaneous with the rise of Christianity, you start seeing a lot of texts, like The Assumption of Moses and 3 Baruch, that deal with various flavors of eternal punishment.
Basically, this is a friendly reminder from your local religion degree holder to avoid treating the dominant strain of a religion as the only strain.
TIL: JRR Tolkien’s great granddaughter, Ruth Tolkien, is the only blind person in the UK to be a competitive fencer. She is currently ranked the #186th best fencer in the country.