Rowney Marshal

Boyd's 'Origin Stories' - RM responds

Rowney Marshal — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:15:00 +0100

ROWNEY MARSHAL RESPONSE TO:

“ON THE ORIGIN OF STORIES: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction”

by BRIAN BOYD,

published May 2009, by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Brian Boyd is ‘University Distinguished Professor’ in the Dept of English at the University of Auckland, specialising in Nabokov.

The above-named study’s book blurb summarises the content as follows:

In the first half of the book

“Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what a difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to the stories we love.

Art is a specifically human adaptation…it offers tangible advantages for human survival… derives from play, itself an adaptation widespread among intelligent animals…sharpened social cognition, encouraged co operation and fostered creativity.

After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ and Dr Seuss’s ‘Horton Hears a Who!’, demonstrating how an evolutionary lens can offer new understanding and appreciation of works of literature. What triggers our emotional engagement with these words? What patterns facilitate our responses? The need to hold an audience’s attention…is the fundamental problem facing all storytellers. Enduring artists arrive at solutions that appeal to cognitive universals: an insight out of step with contemporary criticism, which obscures both the individual and universal.”

PRESS REVIEW in New Scientist of 23^rd May 2009, pg 44.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227091.900-review-how-storytelling-shaped-humanity.html

ROWNEY MARSHAL RESPONSE Introduction:

I was delighted that anyone had written on this topic and found the study exciting, innovative and stimulating. However, some of Boyd’s analysis and conclusions differed from my own consideration of the subject, hence the response which I hope adds to the debate he has authoratively begun.

This is not an academic study, however. I have the cohones to engage, because, after decades of reading of both literature and science above the populist level for research, I have formed opinions , and because, motivated by a commitment in my scifi fiction to stay within parameters constrained by the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, and by an interest in furthering wonder at the cosmos by manipulating words not belief systems, I have a vested interest in developing an objective understanding of this subject.

ROWNEY MARSHAL RESPONSE Summary:

I start with refining some definitions:

Work as defined mechanically, emphasizing the time dimension, extended by Kauffman to include constraints and Marx to include the means of production, to initiate a cost-benefit analysis in societal groups.

Play as it differs in juvenile and adult populations, examining Boyd’s concept that play is rewarded rehearsal whilst also being free.

Types of play named as Diversion and distinguished from Rehearsal.

Comparing Rehearsal and Diversion with Work and allocating costs to each.

Feature of playing named as Immersion.

I continue with a discussion of audience investment of time in leisure pursuits and argue a special place for reading the modern novel format:

Place of work and play in society contrasting each with the audience investments.

Discrimination between audience investments in different art experiences, cost-benefits and features of human attentiveness, called Escapism and Exploration.

Audience attention and motivation constrained by energy and time limitations, in relation to selecting for non-survival activities and between types of activity for surplus time/energy.

Recent advent of literacy and impact on analysis of literature as rooted in conflated ‘arts’.

Tracing a modern niche for the behaviour of reading.

I add to Boyd’s study by differentiating between art maker and receiver:

Consideration of Boyd’s group selection pressures upon audience choices versus drivers for authors.

Constraints upon solo composers and their access to audiences as differing through time and societies.

Authorial characteristics of personality and the high investment/low return of composition as an endeavour that demands explanation.

Selection effects on solitary creativity, negative and positive reinforcements for the activity.

Inspiration concepts in creativity, recent work on brain modelling & configuration promoting possible creativity & traits required to sustain novel writing.

Special place for literary endeavour and specific characteristics of authors that support explorative fictionalizing, differing from other artistic labours.

Inaccessibility of readership implying self-sustaining motivation for the majority of writers, unable to achieve success in audience attention-grabbing.

Conclusion, writers need a separate explanation from audiences.

FULL RESPONSE ATTACHED AS PDF BELOW

ROWNEY MARSHAL

www.rowneymarshal.co.uk

contact@rowneymarshal.co.uk

So this blog then, #3

Rowney Marshal — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:12:00 +0000

If those two had separate heads to clash together I would. They make it sound so black and white, so limited to duality. Once the cosmic verbiage starts, disappearing up one’s own navel is almost inevitable.

The bottom line is that whatever Rowney Marshal’s public persona becomes, this is not a dialogue, it’s simply a couple of voices in the chorus, suddenly in danger of having to understudy the main role, without coaching or a script.

I have had lots of titles and retraining over the years. Keeping the peace between RM and BK requires many bridging characters, although for clarity of purpose, I prefer to think of us as Job Descriptions, although ordering the mental traffic is more like being a MC in a piccadilly of a circus, rather than a MD in an hierarchically structured firm. I have tried to argue for as few personalisations as I can get away with, and many characters remain only briefly as fictionalisations, keeping the bulk of the mental workforce professionals.

I have had names over the years, being a persistently-necessary complex. An elementary part of me started off as ‘God’, when I had quite a loud voice delivering commandments and a still small one that whispered constantly of failure to avoid original sin becoming. Faith failing instead, I got sublimated to avoid the pitfalls of repression (energising, demonising, obsessing) and dubbed ‘The Objective Observer’, which even I knew was not a job description, but a mission statement based on aims and objectives that were at best aspirational and never achievable. These days I’m not even the Minute Taker, more the producer of the occasional narrative highlights of too many histories to count.

And of course, that ‘I’ is only a pseudonym. But that’s part of the sanity ecology. If you don’t call all the personalities and characters ‘I’ and allow them all regulated and limited access to the vocal chords or written word, the body feels dissociated and as if it’s an actor in its’ own life, never real, always at one remove, and with no core ownership of the selfhood concept.

There are plenty of selves to choose from in a lifetime. Many only come into being by enacting a role until it becomes automatic and others are roles that can be set aside after exiting that particular stage. If the stage is inside your imagination, the multiverse is the only limit. So, I am happy to allow time to BK, RM, the one who communicates with animals, not to mention the one who met the elves and a host of more obviously competent functionalities. The worst thing any of us can think of is the monotony of an internal monologue.

So, to keep the debate healthy and competitively diverse, investing ideas, traits, talents, characteristics etc with personality maintains an evolving neural ecosystem, empowered by the passion for survival every bounded self carries. A meta-‘I’ is unnecessary in a collectively autocatalytic emergent set, because if you think you’re God you’re really in trouble, since inevitably you’re making God in your own, temporally and spatially and species limited, image.

But a manager of all the nonsense this method of living throws up, that’s a role everyone needs --- ego, ergo sum.

So this blog then, v2.0 The Black Knight response

Rowney Marshal — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:05:00 +0000

On the subject of ‘Who Rowney Marshal is?’, I must say the perspective above is biased in the extreme. To me, RM is just convenient shorthand for a pain in the neck. Spare a thought for the body that RM infests. Trying to get any serious work done is problematic in the extreme when you always have to be repressing the drive to write down all the collectively-autocatalytic sets of self-narrators requesting time with the hand. Imagine the depth of that body’s inhalation and dropping shoulders as it finally relaxes after months of such repression of RM in order to fulfil the creature’s contradictory vision of self-publication.

It didn’t have to form a company, learn how to use Photoshop to design (aah! Just design in visual media is enough of a challenge), learn how to make print-ready documents and work through the credit crunch effect on printer-on-demand providers, set up a unit of capitalist exploitative potential in order to recoup costs (minimum aim) and separate taxation rules from the individual person attached publicly to the body, design (again, aagh!) and build a website and now the damn products need marketing to sell and have the desired effect of being read.

Only now it transpires that the persona of Rowney Marshal has to usurp, at least for some of the time, the physical body in public. I don’t remember that being in the deal when I decided to allow professional amounts of time to constructing the written effort. Some (few) people don’t want to go out. After all, the up side of having RM in my head is the places I go from my armchair. I want to stay home and let RM out to play. I had been doing the producing a product work item by new item, since I didn’t know how to do any of these tasks, so I had allowed myself to postdate any research into marketing, it never having entered my purview hitherto. I reckoned vaguely it would all be possible anonymously via the wondrous communicable disease of the internet. Now RM wants my face too.

Of course, RM has been a part of me of so long that, in a way, it feels like coming out to become Rowney Marshal. But it also seems to be a fiction, especially since, without the feedback of an audience, that small circle of hell known as fame, to feed its construction, the persona will have to be a choice I can generate alone, preferably one I can live with. RM is no help in this matter. Getting RM to conceive of a fixed bodily form is almost as hard as getting Vanity to choose what it’s going to wear to the ball. So no help with any part of the costuming then. RM shrugs...

humanity and its’ fashions and selfconsciousnesses are a bit beneath it. Lots of stuff is when you’re off tiptoeing between universes in a ftl fugue. Believe me, I have to work hard to follow RM through some of the longer clauses and denser concepts, and I did the bloody research. I just don’t have the memory buffer for the recall without a level of stuttering RM despises, along with the rest of the limitations.

On the other hand, it strikes me as a bit rich that I should have to give up my privacy to publicize the MemeQueen’s alternative views of what might have been. It’s not like my life experience wasn’t massively illuminating to the development of those opinions – some would say, obsessions. If I got past them, why hasn’t the Author? But, as MemeQueen, she hasn’t got past thinking the chessboard has pawns, such as me and my longsuffering siblings, which are there only to sacrifice themselves to her gameplan and defend her corner in perpetuity, or at least until defeated. I can’t even see the enemy, meself. And life is never black and white, even when life and death, but then again, I have trouble with the Vulcan version, never mind one in multiple dimensions and parallel branchings, so who am I to talk? Which is part of my argument against turning into RM as a public entity. I’m not reluctant to give my voice in the cause, because I’m articulate enough, but do I want my functionality as a professional citizen of a constrained utility undermined by the imaginary concepts which RM might be required to discuss? So far, ‘alien sex?’ has been the most consistent response to the information that I, the body, wrote these novels. Not, for instance, Kauffmannian spirituality (Stuart A).

Content aside, I may be the disappointment. The spirit being willing, the flesh has not been maintained by any attention to potential public display coming in the future. As for the standards, the dogwalking wardrobe could upgrade to tramp with advantage. Et cetera...

RM desires a cessation to the whinging at this point. Just deal with it.

That’s told me. So I’ll just stop and play Oasis, D’You know what I mean? at the creature very loudly for a bit. (It doesn’t disturb the neighbours, as it’s within headphones) unless I shout along – I just might.

The Black Knight.

So, this blog then.

Rowney Marshal — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:08:00 +0000

What do my currently-non-existent visitors want?

You probably want to know something about the author: Rowney Marshal.

Who could Rowney Marshal be?

·        Pseudonym of the ‘real’ author

·        Character in a fictional construct called self by someone

·        Boltzmann brain trapped in early cerebrally-based imagination of the child that grew into the author

·        Parallel world seepage

·        Fictional creation come to life as a consequence of not publishing that book

·        Musing scribe of black knight

·        Channel and narrative vocalisation of quantum-tunnelling minds from other universes in the multiverse, as per the sleeting inspirations of Terry Pratchett and the Boltzmann brain paradox

·        Emergent collectively autocatalytic neurally persistent set of references newly closed into organism with life

·        Human individual imagination that illuminates through biography the written text, as per modernist Leavisite critical theory.

·        Product of zeitgeist, cultural and evolutionary psychology of this age and geography, within the context of scifi plagiarising meme-reproduction, as per structuralist/evolutionary psychological literary theory

·        Compartmentalised repository of all the thoughts and experiences that would make a normal person insane if they believed them, whereas, fictionalised, they remain in the ‘willing suspension’ temporary file buffer.

·        Honed nonsense

·        The bit of a human that is not concurrent with its 11% banana genome but specific to the temporal lobe anomalies that Homo sapiens is heir to.

·        The holodeck of the imagination

·        The armchair Kirk boldly going

·        The little kid who remembers meeting the elves (they were green and a few inches taller than the nearly-four year old I was)

·        The person who floated beyond the body and beyond the flaming triangles and circles of Platonic space to meet the significant Other

·        Not the person who speaks to animals – they’re the conduit between the Other and This Here

·       Not the person who is the conscientious unit of capitalist labour, the one who excels in the third of the three R’s, every cell a winner

·        Not the trained reductionist left-brain, utterly vaccinated against any more viral beliefs

·        Not the literary critic with the antique degree

·        Not the face in the mirror on which the endless ploughing of Time is carving the furrows of experience

·        The eyes in the mirror where the fallen leaves are ocean-greens and the deep pool in the sunlit glade is a black hole

·        Not the person who drives the road with care

·        The person who flies the fighter bomber with everyone’s name on it

·         The inner anger against indoctrination of children

·          Not the inner compliance as the child of grace

·         The Heron – solitary silent killer of the marshes pterosaurian flying relic

·          Not (just) the Dog – bite worse than bark, that’s the growl that gets to the basal ganglia

·       Not the hermit

·         The reluctant external persona

·          Not the person who has an opinion on everything and likes to tell people it

·          The opinion on everything

·           Not the obsessive researcher

·        The willing suspension of disbelief – within tightly prescribed parameters – the laws of the   multiverse – still emergent, so plenty of scope...

Is that enough to be going on with?

Of course, when I use the phrase ‘the person’ I don’t necessarily intend to infer that the construct was singular, seamless, with narrative consistency throughout - whichever persona is being referred to, they are all temporary and only storytelling gives a satisfactory beginning, middle and end to any his/herstory.

You alone own yours. So whatever tale you’re telling yourself, remember we either write our own epics or settle for the post-it note version of life. I think you can guess how many sagas are awaiting us all in the quantum superposition – but I bet you can’t conceive the second-order infinities that really means.

Enjoy your quantum break-time, ride the crest of the advance wave, choose the horizon you want, and collapse it into the next universe. (In other’s words, ‘if you book them, they will come’, but only if you squint until you’ve placed your feet firmly into the next universe, having ‘jumped the life to come’ from this ‘bank and shoal of time’ – that’s why it’s better to get technical, the language is more precise and with fewer mixed metaphors.)

Oh, and Happy New Year.

WELCOME TO ROWNEY MARSHAL BLOG....

Rowney Marshal — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 14:03:00 +0000

Rowney Marshal invites all comments on the TriAge novels.

Be creative: add your visualisations of the TriAge characters.

Be competitive: add your designs of avatars in the Game.

CLICK ON ATTACHMENT TO READ EXCERPT OF TRIAGE I, TERRARISE, Chapter 1, 1st 11 pgs