Aeon
An ancient
Greek Philosopher by the name of Plato (b. 428 BCE) once used the
word ‘Aeon’ to denote the eternal world of ideas he conceived as existing
“behind” the perceived world. That whole cave allegory bit? All about about the
‘aeon’.
A couple
hundred years later, Christianity started using the same Ancient Greek word in
the phrase ‘eternal life’ – translated as the ‘Kingdom of God’, or ‘Heaven’,
and western civilization has carried the idea ever since. (Not that I’ll be
discussing religion on this website – sorry not sorry trolls.) So ‘aeon’ isn’t an
uncommon or merely an ancient idea. Plato was just a couple thousand years (and
counting) ahead of his time. But here’s one advancement: instead of being
dragged up through the entrance of the cave like poor Plato, imagine trying to
look for the door.
Fiction
You’ve heard the phrase
‘unfinished novel’; I’ve been working on Book I of the SeaWild Annals, The Door to the Sea, for more years than will seem probable. About
two thirds finished (70,000ish words) it is, for lack of a better word, stuck
-- though I know I could coherently have finished the story long
ago if I weren’t paying so much attention to completing the underlying
philosophical themes. But that’s where this thought I once had comes
in: Any sufficiently advanced fantasy might be
indistinguishable from philosophy. Which is why I'm writing the
magnum opus The Door to the Sea rather than writing something else.
Oh wait. I am writing
something else -- precisely because the magnum opus is very...
magnum-opus-y. I had this hope I might actually finish something one
day so I started writing Mekors of War / Findler
of Peace.
Originally a conceived as a short concept work designed specifically for
internet consumption, this too was foundering right about the half way mark.
But with Mekors/Findler I've decided to adjust: the format isn't as important
as the meditation on the sustainability of violence. And eventually I'm
really going to finish something longer than a poem. Really.
But there’s a label for
my longer format writing, ‘Metaphysical Fantasy’, which helps understand why ‘I tend to bite off more Metaphysical than I my writing
can Fantasy’. Yes, Metaphysical Science Fiction might be more
appropriate in some cases but hey, it’s not my phrase. Pick a search engine,
copy, paste, and discover. Or ignore the label, it’s not used often enough for
anyone to know what you’re talking about --the
purpose of life and the meaning of it all-- and besides it sounds kind of
pretentious.
But this intersection
between speculative fiction (which
actually does means something) and philosophy (you
know, thinking about the truth of things) is what my website mostly seems to be
about.
Yeah I
thought of ‘Metaphysical Speculative Fiction’ too, but trust me it sounds even
worse.