What Wakes The Deep Mind [Shōgun x The Mountain In The Sea]
David: Pat, you’ve recommended two separate texts that are, in their own ways, about what it means to be a person, and what is scary about aliens. First, The Mountain In The Sea, Nayler’s meditation on discovering a sentient race of Octopus, and second, Shōgun, an Edo period drama about John Blackthorne arriving in Japan and the political consequences for control of the regency. Both concern themselves with the discovery of the “other” - the thing which we attempt to categorise only to discover it behaves under an entirely foreign set of rules and is capable of other worldly things.
Perhaps the connective tissue between the two texts is this idea of fear. Fear of the unknown capacity and the unknown motives of this new category of personhood. Which has me thinking a lot about how much the social is predicated on its exclusions, and by extension, why the question of the other is so exclusive to horror, right? Although maybe it’s just framed differently in other genres. Colonialism and cinema of exploitation leverages the concept of the different other but isn’t so much about its existence.
Toward the climax of The Mountain In The Sea Nayler has Ha dive for the first time in the whole book (wild to consider that four chapters before the end of the book she finally gets in the water) and the octopus shape-shifts in front of her. She provides this chilling proclamation that sat me the fuck up in my chair: “it is already everywhere and we never see it.” Chilling stuff from Nayler that really does encapsulate the way that there’s never a “and now they’re here moment” when it comes to these foreign aliens arriving. Like yes, there’s surely a first dude that shows up, but almost immediately John Blackthorne runs into Spaniards in Japan, like immediately. The other are here in small pockets, gradually integrating and flourishing.
That was all a very long way to say: isn’t it interesting that both stories are about who gets to be a person, and what it even means to be a person. John loses his personhood almost immediately and becomes a vassal. Evrim the fully AI man is somewhere between a person and a machine. And then there’s the slaves on the fishing boat. Both stories are deeply concerned with the fear of the other, who is granted personhood by the state and what that even means, and they’re both stories you recommended to me, interesting right?
Patrick: I see what you mean about The Mountain in the Sea. It’s terrifying, the capacity for imagination that alien (cephalopodic) life would have. If we can dream it up, that means so could they.
Honestly I hadn’t considered Shōgun in that light. The themes that stick out to me most in that show are Truth. Not entirely perpendicular to your theme of personhood.
“The Japanese say you have three faces. The first face, you show to the world. The second face, you show to your close friends, and your family. The third face, you never show anyone.”
Experiencing the Shōgun’s court through Blackthorne’s eyes is the beginning of this idea. It then quickly turns around and hints at the same dynamic between the Japanese and the Portuguese Jesuits. Is anyone telling the truth? The Japanese revere the beauty of the natural world. The Europeans are obsessed with their omnipotent God (even if they can’t agree which one is real). These pursuits of truth have an obvious discordant note with how they act. Are they so different from each other after all?
I feel like The Mountain In The Sea ends where it does because the likely outcome for the octopuses in that world are grim. There’s a parallel drawn with the octopus that Ha has a relationship with to people like herself. Some people are good. They will try to coexist and understand each other. And then the next 10 people will be looking to exploit and destroy the rest.
I can’t blame the octopuses for slashing throats with razor shells. It’s a human reaction to how they’ve been treated (I like how in the book they describe real videos from Youtube about people interacting with octopuses).
But yes I see your theme about othering, and I leave you with this.
If octopuses did become sapient, would they hate the Japanese especially?
David: The question, I think, is exactly the point of The Mountain In The Sea: to reduce a culture to a monolith is to strip individuality away. If you asked me: would Ha’s octopus hate the Japanese especially I might be able to begin to compose a theory. Even calling it “Ha’s octopus” feels wrong, let’s go with The Shapesinger. The Shapesinger appears to be a mentor, a protector. This is the same creature that killed the fisherman. The same that teaches history and words to the young of the octopus garden. The Shapesinger employs ink and pattern and rhythm to produce meaning, and so too the Japanese in Shōgun practice calligraphy. Haiku. The rhythm of their rituals. I think the Shapesinger might recognise some facet of themselves in the Japanese, and perhaps hate their reflection more than anything.
I’m deliberately conflating your theme of truth and the other now to make a point.
Early on in Shōgun, Blackthorne is “given” a house and a woman. He finds the whole experience frustrating, declares himself a prisoner and he’s not wrong. Later that evening Blackthorne throws a tantrum. Stomps around the yard. Lady Mariko quietly chastises John, “it is disrespectful to stand on the moss,” she murmurs. To your point: this reverence for the natural world demands a question: is it disrespectful? Is John truly the other because he does not respect the moss? So too, is Evrim actually a person or are they another type of person? How can we meaningfully separate the notion of othering from truth. Consider the way a board of directors other themselves from their business by deciding what to disclose and what to keep to themselves: the third face is shared between them in order to make money. Late in the novel Ha must contend with the fact that, by existing as a person, she has co-signed the destruction of the planet. Is it disrespectful to stand on the moss? Yes, but is it necessary?
So, I see your point: the Japanese respond to Blackthorne’s crew by locking them in a cave, intent on their torture and execution. How is that different than how the Octopus experience humanity writ-large? Our repulsion to the other unless it can be bent to your benefit. What both texts share is a clear comprehension that technology in the hands of humanity, no matter how amoral, will be used in service of violence. The distance between what we say and what we do. That, to me, is the truth.
That is what both stories share. Even the evil CEO of the mega corp in The Mountain In The Sea ends up being a worn-down programmer, a person who runs when they are anxious. A thing I also do. Ha destroys her point-five, realising it has been a tool to hide the truth. Truth and becoming are everywhere in these texts, and I wonder if something of this moment, this moment where so many people do not choose how to spend their time but allow a techno-organic machine to feed them content, I wonder if something in this moment demands the writer’s lens turn upon such questions. Shōgun examining a feudalist past bent toward one leader employing violence of the state in total control, and The Mountain In The Sea grasping for desperate and futile preservation of the planet in the face of new forms of technology and being.
Patrick: “Truth and Becoming”, hey?
Y’know one of my favorite plots in Shōgun is the relationship between Blackthorne and Mariko’s husband Buntaro. Buntaro is the kind of man that, within his environment, is bred for success. He can catch a fly with his bare hands the same way he can fight off a horde of samurai. He can project the most austere countenance in the service of his lord. He can even make the tea good.
So goddammit why doesn’t his wife like him?!
Enter John Blackthorne. A scoundrel, but one who values life and laughter (and coincidentally respects women). Buntaro’s unwillingness or inability to grasp why Mariko hates him and likes Blackthorne is so wonderfully developed throughout the show.
Here’s an example of how “Truth” is larger than a system (of culture). The candidness that Blackthorne embodies is so opposite to the rituals and screens of Japanese life. This flagrant barbarism that cracks open Mariko’s heart of ice, that is real. Buntaro does not understand it for most of the show. How can he? But at the end he must come to some sort of revelation. That his paradigm of existence falls under a larger one. A worldly paradigm that he has not been exposed to, yet is there.
It takes Mariko’s utter and total rejection, right before her death, for him to accept that he is ignorant, and humbly offers his service to Blackthorne to recover his burnt ship.
The characters in The Mountain In The Sea have a similar revelation, albeit a more academic one. It’s hard to realize what paradigm of thinking you’re in, until you're out of it. How does the octopus’ unique physiology and environment affect its perception of reality? How does perception of reality shape your mode of consciousness? How does that then express itself in communication?
Ha and the team accept that they know little and less about what they’re dealing with.
Blackthorne thought the cross-cultural first contact was intense. Wait until he hears about cross-species first contact.
David: The note of only being aware of a paradigm until a rupture is the turn key of what I have in my head about Shōgun. What makes Blackthorne such a threat initially is his ability to rupture the existing paradigms of the Japanese body politic. This is why he is instructed to teach his ways of warfare. This is why the Spaniards are so threatened by his knowledge. I’m drawn, predictably, to consider those moments in my life when the rupture occurs: in particular, moments like reading Das Kapital for the first time and being left with the feeling of the scales dropping from the eyes, and suddenly the entire world is so clearly wrong. The plans they have drawn and those who benefit from their execution are killing us, literally.
The other aspect of Buntaro and Lady Mariko that you put in my mind is that Lady Mariko far prefers Buntaro as a hero who died well than she ever prefers him as a husband. That he is left behind and “dies” - something out of Lady Mariko’s control - is what opens the door for Blackthorne. I often think the same of myself after breakups, at the risk of quoting Taylor Swift in an academic context, “I always felt I must look better in the rear view” - Buntaro suffers this fate, too. These moments leading up to the rupture are innocuous until they are not, and then very suddenly one day we cannot go back.
In The Mountain In The Sea we see Ha grappling with truth throughout her time on Con Dao. She feels an outsider to her own life in a lot of ways. The white blood cell: necessary, but always the other. Outnumbered. This life changing experience of making first contact is the rupture that drives her perspective to change forever. She forces herself to reach out to Evrim. Even tries to make peace with Altantsetseg. And the net result of this rupture is Ha destroying her point-five. Aside from the gut turning reveal that her partner is a prescribed AI companion, it’s that Ha must physically destroy the device to free herself from the old paradigm for good. An act of resistance, of taking action, whereas Lady Mariko’s death forces Buntaro to surrender his ego. Yet even Ha’s act of destroying the point-five is an act of surrender: she surrenders to the truth. The truth that she is alone. Truly. Irreversibly. And the truth is that the only person who can change that is herself. This section of Dan Harmon’s book, You’ll Be Perfect When You’re Dead, illustrates that revelation Buntaro and Ha must contend with, and what embodies a large aspect of my current understanding of reality.
“Nothing you do matters as much as you think. Your greatest achievements aren’t yours at all, they’re accidents and jokes. You’re a puppet, the universe does the work, and it gets the most done when you’re moving the least. Surrender, flow, relax. Don’t be hard on yourself, don’t put pressure on yourself, life is just a chain of experiments and results, and you’ll be perfect when you’re dead.”
Patrick: “Only being aware of a paradigm until it’s rupture” stirs up memories of reading Robert Mckee. In his chapter on climaxes in his book Story, he talks about this prying open of expectation and reality and how it focuses onto a Dilemma.
“The dilemma confronts the protagonist who, when face-to-face with the most powerful and focused forces of antagonism in his life, must make a decision to take one action or another in a last effort to achieve his object of desire. How the protagonist chooses here gives us the most penetrating view of his deep character, the ultimate expression of his humanity.” What he doesn’t say in that section (it’s in the overall context of the book, just not in that section) is that the object of desire is often unconscious. We don’t know what we want, truly, because that desire often lies outside of our paradigm.
Yes Buntaro wants his wife to like him, but he also resents her for her bloodline. John Blackthorne wants to leave Japan, but he’s there because he abandoned England (and his whole family) to recklessly make a name as a great explorer.
Ha wants to study the octopuses, thinking it will unlock some grand revelation that will explain her sadness. What she realizes instead is that it’s a self absorbed delusion. Everyone is just waiting for the solutions to their own sadness, while being indifferent to each other’s, and that’s part of the shared cause. They can’t know what they want because it's immaterial. It’s something more. The conclusion these characters come to at the end of their respective stories is the same as what a lot of great stories illustrate. Life throws you, and that's a blessing.
Mckee points out how you react in the face of this rupture is an expression of your deepest character. Do you drop your pretensions and boldly step into your new paradigm, or do you forever resist in a hellish cycle of confusion? Or do you do a Walter White and think you have it all figured out because you broke out of one paradigm and stepped into another?
Stories are like metaphysics when you get down to this level of abstraction.
Is this useful as narrative theory?
Or just … life in general?
I’m sure these are very stale revelations to the buddhist robots on Con Dao….
David: This is maybe why these two texts strike such fragile, rich notes for me. They approach people’s psyche with an ecosophic lens: this treatment of subjectivity as an interwoven product and feedback loop of the social and the environmental, not some pseudo-scientific list of attributes: think by contrast of Lacan and Jung and Freud attempting to flatten people into these boxes that feel about as useful as a horoscope. Accepting your life is nothing but entropy, not some maze to solve, is indeed a brave one, but for a character like Buntaro the challenge is realising that when you help others, you are not owed a thank you. You help others because it is good and just and kind. When Lady Mariko prostrates before Toranaga and begs for death we learn that Buntaro never told Mariko that he married her to save her life. How little interest Buntaro must have for Mariko as a person that this never arose over the course of their decade long marriage. And so we must ask ourselves: does Buntaro want Mariko to like him, or does he want her to be grateful? And in being grateful, does that progenerate into reality his heroicism, something that he cannot proclaim himself. This sort of logical loop honour and restraint.
Like Toranaga, the buddhist robots are the only remaining lifeforms with a claim to this island: they embody the culture of what used to be, before the island was annexed in the name of environmentalism. And they will be there long after Ha and her team, solar powered forever philosophers. Yet one day long after the next war and the next war and the next war, when humanity has erased itself from the surface of the planet and been reabsorbed into the soil, those machines will still be tending their temples and thinking their lofty thoughts. Yet the sea salt blown in from the ocean will find their circuits, and eat away at their joints and connections, an impossibly slow infection with no white blood cells to purge the invading material until one day silence will seek them out, too. Nothing will remain but empty metal shells, skin cracked and brown with rust, banded in green fissures of oxidised copper. Statues waiting for the spiders to spin and for the grass to blossom. One day I wonder if the octopus will reclaim the island, and as they walk along the cracked tiles would they discover these bizarre, impenetrable monoliths of a failed people and understand this failure for what it was, or would they look upon this techno-organic henge of pagan metal and come to worship these unknown deities.
