BREAKER OF INFINITIES 4-171 to 4-172
Chapter: 4
A stagnant flow of endings. Un-time unbound. Merging to form the multi-none
A sickly dance of matter, malignantly benign. Greeting the chasm – unbearable, sublime.
-Meshuggah, “Dehumanization”, Catch 33 (2005)
That’s probably not supposed to happen
You do not exist until you test your faith.
This scene makes me realize that “”Prim Masters the Road” may not be about Pree Allison after all.
Ah, such tragedy. To be so good and noble and kind as to be willing to give of yourself, to wield a dread knowledge that would corrupt many to selfishness instead for the betterment of others…only to learn that suffering is inevitable, that they will always choose it, that there is no possible future in which you solve the problems of misery and make of the world a paradise.
In the face of that, of knowing that the battle can never actually be won, how tempting indeed it wold be to choose sloth.
She didn’t choose Sloth.
There is no free will, there is no choice. There is, quite literally, nothing that she could have done other than the thing she did.
Jadis just did the thing that she would always do because that’s what she would always have done.
Oh, she chose it. She chooses it. She will choose it. All the paths are laid out before her. The only one she will ever actually walk is illuminated.
Knowing exactly what you are going to choose to do in advance is a special torment. Being able to lie to yourself about doing better next time is very comforting for most people.
But she didn’t choose it, then. Because choosing something means you could have picked something else. If you could have never picked a different option, then you couldn’t really choose, since you don’t have free will.
Am I missing something? Is this just 404 level philosophy lecture I didn’t take because I’m an English major? Words have meanings! If the story says there is no free will and no choice, then there is no free will or choice in the story.
My God this chapter has been terrible.
I’d say that the definition has been tortured precisely because Jadis’s own past was tortured.
Let us presume that a woman keeps a very detailed journal. In it, she records every decision she makes. She’s very thoughtful, she records also the decisions she considered making. She died a century ago, and you have found her journal. Lo! You have an incredibly detailed record! You know every decision this woman could have made throughout her life, and you know ever decision she DID make. You know her whole story.
She had free will, back when she was alive. She did in fact make those decisions. There were other paths she could have chosen to walk but didn’t. The fact that you know her choices doesn’t mean she wasn’t making them.
Jadis has read the book. She knows which choices she’s going to make in advance. From her perspective, just like yours reading a dead woman’s journal, all of her decisions have already been made. She’s considered all the alternatives long ago and this is the course through time she decided/decides/will decide to take.
She could have picked a different choice! But she didn’t. She doesn’t. She won’t. And she knows that, because she knows all the choices she will ever be presented with and how they’ll play out and she’s already made all of her decisions.
What a peasant you’ve made of yourself. You lack the will to question, and you lack the insight to perceive. May you drown in your own false reality.
Tell him. Basically his whole schtick boils down to his last sentence: “My God this chapter has been terrible.” He hates that Abbadon said what he said about free will in this story, and will not let it go. He seems to resent having spent time reading, enjoying, and becoming invested in the tale up to this point. Note how he backhandedly makes his points then says variations of “If the story says there is no free will and no choice, then there is no free will or choice in the story”, as if to imply his interlocutors are hoist by their own petard (or Abbadon’s). Sad. If he hates the story this much, he should just give up on it, not grab the “sunk-cost fallacy” with both hands and “waste” MORE time on it.
The way I look at it, is even though Jadis was always going to have this happen, it’s still who she is. Kind of in the same way a fish could wish all its life to live and breathe on land, the fish will be a fish and will always follow out its life dictated by a billion trillion other factors regardless if it’s aware of such. It’s why what ifs are pointless, the choices you made and will make happen because you cannot be anything but yourself, and yourself is a summation of events. Some people will think “oh but if I was born this way,” “if my body was like this,“ “if I made this choice” but the problem with the question is if you were or did any of that you wouldn’t be you. It would be someone else.
Jadis had choices, but she is Jadis and thus will have always made these choices. Which makes it more tragic.
If Catch-22 is so great, why isn’t there a Catch-33???
*Catch-33 appears*
*starts coughing violently*
If there is no point or purpose, no greater meaning…then surely that means you’re free to pursue your own meaning – entirely subjective as it is. If your personal reason for power is to alleviate the suffering of others…there’s no objective reason against that, and it’s as valid as any other subjective reason. I have believed this for as long as I can remember, being in Jadis’ position would just feel like confirmation of this.
My own morals come down to this; happiness is good, fulfillment is good…involuntary suffering is bad. My values are difficult to summarise. My reasons for life and power come down to fulfillment of my morals and other values. If I was in Jadis’ position? All it would change is that I would better know how to fulfill these personal values.
The sequence of memories is intriguing here. Jadis goes straight from asserting her freedom, while beating herself with her irony-bound book of rules, to the Great Machine activating and the priests dying. She’s apparently skipped over the whole killing-her-father-and-taking-his-key thing, along with becoming goddess of 1/7 of creation and bearing the word MIND.
I get that the machine eats her freedom when she becomes bearer of the word SPOILERS, and that this is the natural mirror of her self-assertion. But it seems like she should care more about what came in between. Especially if she still has Daddy issues.
Jadis would likely say that it all happens at once and the sequence doesn’t matter.
I thought the scene with the lightning was implying the killing the father part.
For the goddess of the 1/7th part world, not sure if that happened yet by the time of the first universal war. Could be happening in the background and just not shown.
Hence the Larkin reference above. I suspect that all of Jadis’ ancestors were demiurges, implying that they all fought and/or died in the war.
However, Abbadon said only that Jadis killed her father, not she actually took a knife to him or similar. Possibly she killed him along with the other priests by completing the machine? Daddy’s head asplodes just as she gets to validate herself in his eyes, so closure is cancelled. That would be a side of suck go with the banquet of suckage that is her life.
This really is thematically reminding me of the one sub-story of the three men who are fated to die in a desert and how they react to it.
Jadis starts off as arrogant, proclaiming that she could go against reality. Going forward without any knowledge. But when she was confronted with it, she just turned inward to self pity and self inflected prison to her inner demons.
Allison might be choosing “pain,” but in seeing reality, Allison can shake off arrogance and decide who she is and what she wants. Embracing the pain and thereby being unshackled.
All the demiurge’s are mad after all, Jadis is no different it seems. Though I do have pity.
Dang, that’s quite the tortured past, and this puts Jadis’s earlier comments to Allison about free will in a new light.
Haha monk heads go POP
Knowledge can be powerful but it is also PAINFUL. Dreams can carry one through some of that pain, but for truly great knowledge one needs equally great love and support in order to bear it. Jadis had neither, and her skull was already far too full of pain left by the one called Janus. Small wonder, then, that her dreams were simply swallowed by the void in this moment. Alas, poor woman.
It is the book that must fear your face, not the contrary.
She is so beautiful.
Damn Jadis being all hot and stuff. Hmph.
Asian dads amirite?
(yes I am Asian)
Alison: Well, looks like you’re going through something soooo… [starts backing away]
because he is poorly written. he exists only because jadis needs a backstory, which is “daddy issues”.
Is it not the very essence of Royalty, to look at the undeniable shape of the reality, hear out the way the future will happen as prophesied by immutable fate, and then still say “Nah, fuck you, I’ll do it my way”?
Even if a beetle is told that it cannot learn Pankrash Circle Fighting, it may still decide to learn it anyway, and to hell with your opinion.
What is power without direction, without purpose? Without a goal, something to aim it at? Just like life it does not come with a meaning. You need to give it meaning and purpose. Power for its own sake is worthless but used in the right way it can move the universe.
Again, I feel like too many people are getting hung up on the value of free will vs fatalism versus the value of going and doing. It is equally folly to assume that free will can break a cycle as much as it is to assume fatalism can only continue the cycle. Whether you take a step because you decided to or because the cosmic plinko of protein chains processing along the course of it’s outcome-either way, something happens. It is better to commit to the continuous cutting motion.
Remember, you are master of your own fate. Doesn’t mean you’re any good at it, necessarily…
When is this? All the whens?
NOTHING
Power without a constructive purpose behind it is without value. A lightning strike in a lonely sky is powerful, yet accomplishes nothing.
It makes more nitrogen biologically available at least…
I have figured out the great riddle.
Everyone in the 777,777 universes is a knob head. This makes SO MUCH SENSE…
What Allison saw with the machine
Was not Prophesy
It was Nothing
Perhaps it was Reality…
Perhaps it was the Backdrop against which YISUN’s Lie is shown