#prescience

i like to play along at home with the spring-is-coming-winter-larders-are-bare fasting game. this year ,i'm fasting all of the dissociative moving picture shows that lighten the winter nights

i also like the saint brigid's friday fish fry fundraisers. i wish they had tshirts

i'm allowing myself one movie a week, but i can watch it as often as i want for that week. my thought being 'only reading is rereading'. repetition will evaporate the spectacle and reveal more about how each movie is constructed turning dissociation into presence

last night, the first night, i couldn't pick a movie off my list, because of the idea of committing to it for six days, so i browsed bala's copy of the odyssey that i found in a free pile yesterday

i don't need a battered paperback of the odyssey, but bala sounds like a boba babo hive name, so i'm giving it my attention. it's a very pious text with lot's of dogs, so i guess it's appropriate for a fast

At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order. - Analysis of the Tyrant, the Taraza File: GB Archives Heretics of Dune

Knowledge, however, has no uses without purpose, but purpose - arising out of wishing, desiring, and hope - builds the enclosing walls and diverts one away from infinity into a particular narrow possibility. That is the trap of prescience - to (seek to) know the future absolutely is to be trapped into that future absolutely.

To put a stop to pretending like QM is actually my thing, back to literature. I pondered the orb on this matter in April. And I have addenums to make! (for example, it's not correct to equate the Aen Saevherne to Laplace's Demons; we're beyond classical mechanics)

First, as noted, if prescient beings are more or less blind to the movements of other figures with foresight, it should make conspiring around Ciri possible for someone like Eredin. Secondly, characters who can predict the future might not necessarily wish to look for certain things precisely should they suspect they might not like the answer. For example, contemplating one's own demise (as Auberon may have done).

'"Every judgement teeters on the brink of error," Leto explained. "To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty. - Leto II Children of Dune

There are ways then, in which to use prescience correctly, and ways in which to use it with terrible ends.

The future that you see is the future that you will act upon (even by choosing not to act upon it). In fact, you can say that you have already acted upon it. A thing seen is a thing that has been. And, by being a character of sufficient Influence, positioning, and time, who envisions this, you will be locking everyone else into your future. So if the future includes something you would rather not see come about, you will be locked into a cascade of decisions you have to make in order to steer it - you might alter things by killing someone, or yourself, but things could proceed toward that destiny anyway and with much larger costs. You become trapped, you cannot step off course anymore.

Basically, the art of foresight then, seems to consist in knowing or sensing how - when looking ahead - to maintain degrees of freedom that would allow for creativity in the act of creating the future. An unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty, so future can happen itself in a desirable manner.

"...no one aside from them is capable of understanding their writings. Elven manuscripts, in most cases, mean tortuous symbolism, acrostics, occasionally even codes. The Elder Speech is always, to put it mildly, ambiguous and, when written down, may have as many as ten meanings." - Codringher The Time of Contempt

Can you imagine Ithlinne slapping her colleagues in the world of the Aen Seidhe with her augury, signalling that all the landscaping and fey architectural drip must again be packed up in a bit, because this world too will go to the dogs? A very frustrating way to start the day, to be sure. Except then it becomes difficult to move between realities at will. Bffr. I'd wager a portion of Aen Saevherne's to-do list includes handling the infernal catch-up game that results from their own gift to elvendom.

And, as ever, it's the character and desires of the dreamers that play a central role in what happens. This is literature; here, on the screen of the magi, you learn what it is to be human.

Imagine then Lara Dorren, who is locked into a future of her race's making, hoping for a union between that which is elven and human, knowing it will happen eventually, as it has already happened before.

Imagine Avallac'h, whose sight is set on a time beyond the tale involving the child surprise and her witcher, since he is yet to accept amor fati and how nothing is lost and everything is transformed.

Imagine Auberon, holding on to his role as the demiurge-ruler whose expired ambition tempts him to glance at fate that remains beyond his own existence, glimpsing, in the process, at the sole thing he has yet failed to experience.

Imagine Ciri, who cannot grow and begin to face herself and the fate she will forge until she has returned to the beginning of her needs and slain the darkness that took herself from her.

Or imagine Geralt, who cannot see the future, but can only hope for one, and acts as his heart wills it regardless of what he is told the narrative is going to be like; nothing for him can go differently than it does.