This Djinn is Going Places!

Some Djinn were enslaved by Solomon the wise to build the Temple.

Some Djinn saw how things were going, did not want to surrender their freedom, and high-tailed it out to the desert places.

And some of them travel the earth searching for those who remember the name of God.

But the hero of our story, Biwaras, did none of these things. He worked for a small office of Djinn who granted wishes. His feelings towards human beings was — ambivalent. On the one hand he could not help but respect the human capacity for Free Will, which made them in some respect, resemble the infinite abysses contained within the subjectivity of the Most Merciful. But on the other hand they were often a Bit Much — they were greedy, and selfish, and needed to be taught a lesson about where they were in the great scheme of things. They were not the star of the show — they were not the All Merciful — although they resembled Him.

For example.

Sarah Esmond Jones was the best seller for her group and was rewarded with a vacation to an exotic clime where upon a day trip to the abandoned tomb of a mighty monarch she came across a gem inscribed with runes, from the days of magic, and pocketed it. In dreams her soul was vouchsafed the secret that this gem entitled her to a boon from a djinn, the djinn being — you guessed it — Biwaras. Upon return to New York City Jones found herself in a romantic triangle in which she was over-matched (cf. D. Parton, “Jolene”) and in order to make her battle for the heart of her beloved (Matt) more equal she wished to have an intoxicating smell. As she and Matt drove to the Hamptons he became intoxicated by Sarah’s smell, his BAC reached .28, he crashed the car and let’s just say “He ain’t Pretty No More.”

Biswaras received a promotion. “Well done granting that wish ironically” said his boss the entity Kabkab.

Sarah traveled the Earth and became a mendicant. Whenever she became too close to people they became foolish, intoxicated by her fragrance. She could not be driven in a car or airplane, and she was shunned by the sober. In a souk in Cairo her eye fell upon a medallion. With her last Bitcoin she purchased it. Lightning does struck twice in the same place. It was a medallion that enabled the possessor to extract a boon from Biswaras. She learned as such that night in dream land while her body remained in the Cairo Holiday Inn. When she woke up she went out on the balcony and looked at the Moon Above the Sphinx and said “I want a life that is good. Unironically.”

Biswaras conclaved with Kabkab. “Do I just give her a good life?”

“No. Just kill her.”

“That seems ironic. She wants something good and I kill her.”

“Yeah it’s ironic. The good life for humans is a brief one b/c less suffering. Crack a book.”

“Yes I got that. But that is first level. What about her wish that it be both good and NOT ironic?”

“The ironic thing is that she asked it to be unironic and it was ironic.”

“That seems like bullshit. That seems like “ironic” is just an excuse for fucking over humans.”

“Do I look like a professor of literature?”

“A little.”

“Fine mister smarty pants — you tell me whether the best response to a request for an absence of irony is irony, or a lack of irony? Both of them seem wanting. An absence of irony is simply giving the human what she asks for. Where’s the wit in that? While irony when irony is on the table seems the opposite of unexpected. And where’s the wit in that?”

Biswaras pondered.

Millions of universes below Sarah found her life was good in all ways that she could imagine except one — it was no longer ironic. And, ironically, this provided a mouse of disquiet that nibbled at her treasures of satisfaction. And, even more ironically, her life was even better than it would have been, had it not been ironic. Or not ironic? Who could tell.

Up in the heaven of Djinns, exhausted from working out the logic of all this in order to grant Sarah her wish, Biswaras tendered his resignation to the Demon King Kabkab, afflicter of Man.

If he was going to have to work this hard he concluded, he might as well build the third Temple.

What’s the Point of Telling Stories? Bad Fiction, Good Fiction, Lies Holy and Unholy

If you tell a story to convince people something is true then the point is to get people to believe whatever you are telling them.  If the story is not true and you know it, then you are lying.  If you don’t care about the truth of the story but are telling it anyway in order to get people to believe it you are engaging in what Harry Frankfort calls “bullsh***” — talk without caring about the truth value of what you are communicating.  If you think it’s true but it’s not you are spreading untruth.  Your moral culpability depends upon how hard you work in general to make sure that what you tell is true.  If you are equally likely to tell false stories that make your political or religious party look bad as ones that make it look good then you seem fine; if it turns out to slant in the direction of your political interests you have something to answer for.

Plato advocated the “pia fraus” or holy lie in order to keep his ideal republic going.  In his set-up, a few morally righteous people — The Guardians — know that their society’s castes are a human invention, but they tell a lie in order to get the lower classes to play along.  Lies that claimed to be pious ran rampant in the ancient world.  Every empire and indeed every city state had a fake tale about how it was founded by divine beings.  The pia fraus might be a good idea but impractical for several reasons.  One is that in our current pluralistic, wired globe people are more likely to be able to see through the noble lies.    This can have the opposite of the intended effect: once the sheep know the shepherd is willing to lie for their own good, they will be less likely to believe their shepherds.  Another problem is that in real life it places a huge temptation in the hands of the lying elite to misuse their power.  For an interesting discussion of a contemporary example of  the pia fraus see “Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History”.

This all applies to stories whose point is to convince people to believe things.   What about a story that is not intended to get people to believe things?  When we listen to a story (or watch a movie or play a video game) we engage some of the faculties of our soul that are engaged in real life, but our rational faculties know that they are engaged with something that is not true.  It is a bit like dreaming.  It is a rare person who eats the pillow while dreaming believing it is a marshmallow.  It is a rare person who actually falls in love with Sherlock Holmes and moves to London hoping to marry him.

When it’s working well this kind of dry run can help build up our capabilities.  We can see if we solve the puzzle before Sherlock Holmes does or if we recognize the self-deception of Emma before she does.  We can practice our wisdom or our cleverness or our courage without dealing with the consequences, or rather without feeling the full consequences.  We can actually feel shame if we sympathize with a character’s poor behavior or rationalization for example, but the shame doesn’t hurt as much as the shame we feel for misbehaving or rationalizing in real life.

At its best fiction can challenge our redoubtable capacity for self-deception.  The cunning writer can play to our hopes and fears, teach us how those hopes and fears lead us to selfish behavior, and trick us into identifying with a character who ultimately is flawed. This can teach us to watch ourselves more carefully, and to pay attention to life.  At its best fiction can also enlarge our perspective and teach us that everybody has his story, and that these stories fit together into an intricate web of cause and effect, self-justification and blame, narrowing and expanding of perspective that is beyond anybody’s ability to see in real life, unfolding as quickly as real life does.  At its worst of course it can encourage our wish to dwell in a world of egocentric fantasy, where the little guy always gets the girl, and the moral hero proves he has the right stuff by wasting those who dared disrespect him in a hail of bullets.

There is also a deeper sense in which collections of stories can be part of the founding of a certain mode of experience — call it a culture in the sense in which a code of laws may found a city..  In this sense certain archetypes, and patterns of significance may be set up within which human beings cultivate themselves.  This is rooted in a fundamental aspect of all talk which is that it makes a decision about what is worth paying attention to.  The storyteller in the deepest sense is making it that these sort of things are to be paid attention to and worth caring about.