Dragonstone

“In his conversation with Sam, Archmaester Marwyn makes an interesting point. People have a propensity to capitalize the current troubles and give them a false sense of finality: this crisis is The Crisis! This ending is The End! He has a sense of perspective on those who lack it, and since he believes that nothing really ever ends—telling Sam that “The wall stood through it all, and every winter that ever came, has ended”—he thinks Sam should focus on finishing his coursework and qualifying exams first, so that when the time comes to do real scholarship, he’ll be ready. Without scholarship, real scholarship, humankind would be little better than dogs, thinking only of their last meal and their next meal. If you take the long view, after all, soup and poop are the same thing.”

“As it turns out, the Archmaester has it hilariously wrong. His faith that the wheel will turn the same as it always has, and the game of thrones will go on—such that the key thing is to keep producing timeless scholarship—rests on an assumption that academic scholarship can exist outside of time. “We’re not like the people south of the Twins; we’re not like the people north of the Twins,” he says. We’re not people, he wants to say. But what the soup-poop montage demonstrates is that, in fact, they are people, and even if they don’t think about their last and next meal, someone certainly does. Someone has to bring them their soup; someone has to carry away their poop. And if the Maesters have the luxury of taking the long view—consuming books and churning out more books—then someone has to live life in the sequence of increasingly short and fast cuts in which soup after soup becomes poop after poop; to live the disembodied life of the mind, someone has to be reduced to laborer. To ally yourself with eternity, in other words, is to make yourself the well-meaning enemy of day-to-day people.”

“It’s a deeper, more interesting point than a show which is primarily about war and desire is really capable of making well, but to its credit, it does try. The White Walkers have always been an obvious metaphor for climate change, and they are, now, suddenly real. And the problem with thinking in terms of eternal humanity is that humans aren’t eternal. We live in the Anthropocene, a human-made temporality that humans can un-make, and are, in fact, vigorously un-making; we also, each of us, live in a life that came to a beginning and will come to an end. There is something precious at stake in both of these desperately brief windows of life; we would do well to keep that in mind. People who make the soup understand this, as do the people who clean up the shit.”

“On Game of Thrones, Sam is right and the Archmaester is wrong. Sam isn’t smarter, and he isn’t a better scholar than the Archmaester; of what there is to know, we can be sure, the Archmaester knows it all. But Game of Thrones is fantasy, so the White Walkers are real: what the rational, scholarly Archmaester knows is a poor guide, it turns out, to a fantasy world beyond his rational ken. What if our world is a world not of science, but of science fiction? What if the truth is something that our science can’t prove, and its gravity something that our scientific method—with its focus on the timeless, ceaseless increase of gradual human knowledge—is poorly equipped to appreciate? How do you prepare for the thing that your preparation, by definition, cannot imagine? It’s a hard question but it doesn’t mean it isn’t the right one. Our president, after all, is a person who could not have become president.”

““Hysteria” is a word that Serious Rationalists sometime use to describe people whose embodied emotions get the better of them, a gendered insult based in the notion that women think with their wombs and scientists with disembodied man-brains. It’s not a good term to think with, as such, especially now that every other new book of psychology is about how we think with our bodies. All a term like that does is mark the speaker as the kind of mind that can’t hear what people with bodies are saying, along with a latent layer of fundamental sexism. But the fact that there are no women in The Citadel—that there are no women-bodies there, just man-minds—is a mark of the prejudice that blinds the Maesters to what those who make the soup and carry the poop—of any gender—might know. If you masculinize knowledge, then you feminize its limits.”

“But it’s not because they’re women that they know something that men don’t know, or not precisely that: having had their worlds destroyed around them—having had the unthinkable and unspeakable happen to them—they have brought out of their experiences a useful skepticism about the things that people think they know, in their security. It’s because Jon and Jaime only know what they know, and are satisfied with it, that their knowledge has limits. The world makes sense to them, as the patriarchy does for patriarchs.”

“But take a step back: when has Westeros ever made sense? And why would it start now? It doesn’t do to be realistic in a world where reason doesn’t rule. Experience teaches a different set of expectations; men who tell you it will be fine, it turns out, are usually full of shit. Because Westeros is a place where women, of all people, have learned very well the limits of secure knowledge, it has been left to women and unmanly men to feel and fear what lies beyond the wall of rational knowledge. It’s irrational to expect the unexpected; it’s the opposite of the scientific method and a contradiction in terms. But it’s the one thing a canny watcher of this show must do…and also people who need to live in bodies in a world that has a good record of often not doing what scientific minds have expected it to.”