(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Thursday Morning Open Thread - Looking for a hero [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-17 Hi, everybody! This is my first regularly scheduled Thursday MOT post. I will probably mostly post about book reviews and amateur armchair psychoanalysis (read: philosophy). I am optimistic about my potential to be a version of Chuck Klosterman, but if he were extremist antifa. Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum. Join us, please. The most personally impactful book that I’ve read in many years, thanks to a book club, is Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie. My best attempt to describe it is as a modernist (in the sense of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground) fictional family history and autobiography of a failed mastermind; more specifically, it is written from the perspective of the leader of a nationwide group of superheroes who were born in the first hour of Indian independence from British colonial rule. As many personally impactful books do, this book emerges from a clash of opposites; Salman Rushdie attempts to craft a story that pays homage to both India (itself divided spiritually between Hinduism, Islam, and a hundred other religions) both before and after colonial rule, and does so by writing in the modernist tone that attempts to capture the spirit of oral traditions and word-of-mouth in the execution of its telling. Any software developer who reads Midnight’s Children will understand what I mean in a life-altering way; its writing style is that of the comments of a desperate hack, constantly explaining its most crucial referents and symbols to itself. The book basically demonstrates the limits of pointer logic in the human mind through Rushdie’s fiction. It is as though Rushdie were Bob Ross working with a canvas of the human heart, using his tools of the trade to apply the substance of his spiritual experience. Rushdie was successful enough in its efforts to metagame the decolonization, and then division, experience of India-then that Midnight’s Children was awarded ‘the Booker of Bookers’ in two different judgments of all books that had received the prestigious Booker Prize. For those wondering what in the name of God/Alanis Morrissette/Kimberlé Crenshaw/Cthulhu I am currently talking about: the book talks about the writing of the book. A lot. And not just about the writing of the book (and the nurse that makes such writing possible), but about the events in the book that are yet to happen, that have not happened, that never happen, etc. The first third of the book is the tale of the lives of his grandparents and of his parents. It is a very meta book, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call it the most meta book I’ve ever read. Most of its competitors that I can think of for that title (Eugene Onegin, If on a winter’s night a traveler) were not originally written in English. (I promise that it is well worth reading whatever your level of confidence in your technical skill if you can handle the tragedy of a true-to-life historical narrative, and that it is not just for AstroNOT Boys like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.) The central metaphor that grounds Midnight’s Children, and makes clear the spiritual bridge that the book attempts to build, is embedded in the concept of the superhero. Basically, all babies born in the first hour of India’s independence are endowed with various magical powers. Our narrator is the most powerful, and perhaps the most cursed — he is not just a mind-reader, but a human thoroughfare through the minds of all of the other superheroes, and his mind is the setting for the ‘Midnight’s Children Conference’. It is from this conceit that the gushing torrent of woe-is-me narration and modernist scribblings becomes readable — moreso than, say, Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. The reason that I find this book so effective on a spiritual level is because it manages to make a spiritual analogy to Christianity in an obvious yet unassuming way; it is only through the destruction of the Midnight’s Children Conference that its success can be achieved. It is a passion (read: crucifixion) of no one person, but of the unique strengths of a group of people who are otherwise not at all associated with one another, and of their social network. It is as though Salman Rushdie foresaw the much more straightforward portrayals of martyrdom like ‘hack the planet’ fourteen years before the portrayal of such a screenplay was released for public consumption, and even was five years ahead of the release of the meta, satirical classic Network. Authenticity, realized. The novel’s prescient portrayal of the way that social media and its network effects would turn us all into meatbags of LCL-in-waiting leaves me grasping for some duality to frame it within. This is particularly so because Rushdie’s later-written preface of the novel, in addition to discussing a libel lawsuit filed by the former prime minister of India, makes the remarkable statement that the Western world treats Midnight’s Children as fiction, while Indians treat it as factually based. It is a matter of ironic meta-techne: to be in on what joke? To perceive what wink? Ultimately, I have decided to define a distinction between a ‘BS religion’ — such as polytheism, mysticism, religious syncretism or secular approaches naturally lend themselves to being framed as — and a ‘cult’, such as evangelical Christianity. It is important for Westerners to remember that not every spiritual context suffers from the [messiah as God/messiah as man] dilemma in the majority of their conservative (or centrist! Or left-wing!) religious folk. (Read: The Life of Brian is not as universal as it may feel to you.) And I do genuinely recommend reading or listening to Midnight’s Children if you find this religious distinction confusing, interesting, or something in between. Anyway — ladies, gentlemen, and others: have at it. Enjoy your beverage of choice! 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