raspberryhunter (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
raspberryhunter) wrote2013-01-01 04:25 pm
raspberryhunter) wrote2013-01-01 04:25 pm
Entry tags:
In which I navel-gaze about Moses and Aaron and God. A lot.
Interactive Complexity as Indigenous to Human Systems is the crazy Office-esque crack!AU of Moses und Aron I wrote for yuletide (I talk about my other yuletide fics here), set in a corporation where Moses is the Chief Scientist, Aaron is his salesman/spokesman, and God is the CEO, and instead of talking about God and religion they talk about science and algorithms. NO I DO NOT KNOW WHERE THIS CAME FROM. MY SUBCONSCIOUS MAY NEED TO GET OUT MORE.
It's also, in a sense, a companion story to "Waters." "Waters" treats what I had to say about my personal feelings about the religious philosophies M&A espouses and alternatives thereof, but it doesn't actually explicitly delve into the Moses and Aaron relationship at all (...they're not even characters in "Waters," no wait, I guess Moses gets one speaking line), and I wanted to do that. I also wanted to engage with what seekingferret called the game of telephone -- where the message from God gets changed and filtered, with a monotonic loss of transmission from God->Moses->Aaron->Israelites. (My other fic rejects that idea, so I wanted to do it here.)
And also, I wanted to reconcile Numbers 20 with M&A. There's a glancing reference to "the rock" in Act III of M&A that makes me believe that it is meant to have happened after the Meribah incident. How did that play in to the world of M&A? What happened at Meribah in the world of M&A, and how did that relate to the Act III drama where Aaron is cast out and (in my libretto stage directions) drops dead at the end? In the Bible version, Moses is involved and culpable; how would this even be possible in Schoenberg's conception? And even taking Numbers 20 alone, it never sat right with me that Moses got punished so severely for what seems like a really trivial matter; why was that? This fic is a partial answer to all these questions. (Only partial, because it assumes a closer personal relationship between Moses and Aaron than we really get in Schoenberg, not least because they don't start out as brothers.)
The real impetus for this story, though, was that I watched the Ruhrtriennale 2009 version of Moses und Aron, and that production utterly sold me on the relationship between Moses and Aaron themselves, and I found Aaron rather engaging (though of course flawed, as he is) in that production as well, but I just didn't find Moses at all likeable or sympathetic (okay, fine, "O wort, du wort, das mir fehlt" was shattering), which I think may have shaped some of my reactions to the opera. I mean, it's not the production's fault, because they were clearly trying (and from time to time succeded); Moses is not supposed to be likeable or sympathetic, he's supposed to be above such mundane things. But it makes a difference because Schoenberg clearly expects us to buy in to Moses' philosophy, which is hard for me personally to do when I'm busy thinking, "Man, Moses is really a jerk." Plus which people aren't actually like that -- I mean, solely superhuman jerks! And apparently when I'm confronted with this kind of situation, my response is to try to figure out away to make the character understandable. Through fic!
So I set out to make him a protagonist such that I, at least, could see where he was coming from, without losing sight of the fact that he really is a brusque and unyielding sort of personality. (I am totally aware that this completely goes against the spirit of what Schoenberg was doing, by the way. I think that Moses, like God, is supposed to be not understandable. But if anything this only encouraged me.) But I had to transpose it to the modern era to make his character comprehensible. And then I was at work and talking to a coworker about the necessary evil of HR, and I wrote down in my yuletide file, "Aaron is SO HR! ...no, wait, Sales." and it just sort of snowballed from there. I wrote pretty much the entire draft in a couple of days, before I had more than the bare seeds of ideas for the other fic.
I succeeded in terms of my own reaction. I feel very strongly about the purity of science, about how it can't be compromised for the sake of how you feel about anything. And translating Moses' unbendingness into that milieu made me much more sympathetic towards his point of view.
Interestingly, I completely failed to communicate a major portion of this whereseekingferret was concerned, which makes me sad (not about seekingferret at all, only about my inability to communicate). Seekingferret wrote a very thoughtful and interesting critique of "Complexity" where he reads it as Moshe and Aaron on a more equal footing. In a certain sense he is right, and I will talk about that below. But in another sense, that is not what I meant at all! In "Waters," both Moses and Aaron are missing the point to some extent, which is not what Schoenberg meant but what I get out of it when I watch it. In "Complexity," Moshe is meant to be right. All right, there is a place for image in our imperfect finite minds trying to come to grips with the divine -- and I do believe that (in this world where the Tabernacle was built), and the first half of the fic makes that point -- but in both the central conflicts, the Golden Calf conflict and the Meribah conflict, Aaron is asking to compromise the idea for the sake of the image, compromise the scientific truth for the sake of getting the job done. The choice, when it comes down to the important choice, is between making something look good (the image) and the truth (the idea). And Aaron, in choosing appearances/image, is wrong, wrong, wrong; it is never right to compromise the analysis. You just don't misrepresent science, you must not, for your job or your friends or anything else. And I failed in not making this clear, because in my worldview it is so very obvious that Aaron is wrong that it didn't even occur to me that it might not be obvious to someone who isn't me and didn't know me.
(Moshe is so totally my POV character in this one, despite Aaron being a lot more likeable. What he says about organizational theory? Is what I think about organizational theory. (Sorry if there are any organizational theorists reading this! Feel free to educate me!) And I'm a scientist/engineer by training/profession, and have my discipline's ingrained suspicion of HR and Sales and management (here I should append that my company has lovely HR, no sales as a separate department, and quite understanding management, but it doesn't stop all us engineers from being suspicious of all of them nevertheless). And Aaron talking about quantum correlations? Does not, in fact, make any sense. Oh, Aaron.)
The tragedy -- at least in my particular reimagining; here I'm departing from Schoenberg -- is that when Moshe unbends a little, tries to let Aaron in, when he tries to make that compromise because he does, after all, love Aaron -- that's the moment when we find that Moshe was right all along, that Aaron is wrong, that this compromise can't be made, and when you try to make it, it leads to disaster. As seekingferret says, Moses is right, but the world sets us up for failure.
Well, that's what I meant, anyway. Perhaps that's not what actually came out :)
I'm really glad he wrote that piece of meta, both because it made me aware of this flaw in my writing and because he speaks to something I hadn't thought about when I wrote it -- the Moses-God relationship. Which I think he's completely right about -- as written, the CEO is this shadowy figure On High. (Heh, "Christian New Testament God." Made me laugh. Guilty!) Because of ase's beautiful beta work, I don't think it is so much of a problem in the first half, at least to my reading, but it is somewhat glaring in the second half, especially in the characters' reactions to and aftermath of the pivotal scenes, and it didn't have to be that way. Is seekingferret's reading of M&A correct? I have mixed thoughts on this -- but the point is, it's something I didn't think about when I wrote the story, and I should have, regardless of what my eventual answer turned out to be. About that he was wholly right.
Part of the problem, of course, is that the conception of God is split between the CEO and Science (or math, or algorithms, I think is what the fic actually says, but I'm using Science as a catchall phrase). Although the CEO is intended to be the crackified (New Testamentesque?) persona of God, it's really Science, or the truth embodied by science, that bears the philosophical weight of the Moses-God relationship in the opera. Although I understood this implicitly while I was writing, I don't think I figured it out explicitly, enough to spend time thinking about what it implied in terms of the character dynamics and relationships (in particular, both CEO-truth and CEO-Moses). Ah well.
And now that I am thinking about it, I suspect there are a couple of parts I could tweak very slightly that could address these concerns and make everything work rather better, so why didn't I? Eh. Well, if I have seekingferret's permission and blessing, perhaps I shall.
Paean of praise to betas: "Complexity" did not have a Judaism beta (for fairly obvious reasons, but in hindsight, I should have gotten one).elements_ao3 whacked the word choice like anything. mithrigil deserves major points for pointing out, "To be completely frank, this is more like 'if Schoenberg wrote bible fanfic instead of an opera and put all his kinks in it' than fanfic for the opera itself," and so have I summarized it. And, as I sort of said above, if I'd considered ase's critique more carefully, I might have made my point of view more understandable. To the extent that it is understandable, I totally have ase to thank for pushing me to that level.
There, I should probably have written an essay instead of fics and have been done with it :)
It's also, in a sense, a companion story to "Waters." "Waters" treats what I had to say about my personal feelings about the religious philosophies M&A espouses and alternatives thereof, but it doesn't actually explicitly delve into the Moses and Aaron relationship at all (...they're not even characters in "Waters," no wait, I guess Moses gets one speaking line), and I wanted to do that. I also wanted to engage with what seekingferret called the game of telephone -- where the message from God gets changed and filtered, with a monotonic loss of transmission from God->Moses->Aaron->Israelites. (My other fic rejects that idea, so I wanted to do it here.)
And also, I wanted to reconcile Numbers 20 with M&A. There's a glancing reference to "the rock" in Act III of M&A that makes me believe that it is meant to have happened after the Meribah incident. How did that play in to the world of M&A? What happened at Meribah in the world of M&A, and how did that relate to the Act III drama where Aaron is cast out and (in my libretto stage directions) drops dead at the end? In the Bible version, Moses is involved and culpable; how would this even be possible in Schoenberg's conception? And even taking Numbers 20 alone, it never sat right with me that Moses got punished so severely for what seems like a really trivial matter; why was that? This fic is a partial answer to all these questions. (Only partial, because it assumes a closer personal relationship between Moses and Aaron than we really get in Schoenberg, not least because they don't start out as brothers.)
The real impetus for this story, though, was that I watched the Ruhrtriennale 2009 version of Moses und Aron, and that production utterly sold me on the relationship between Moses and Aaron themselves, and I found Aaron rather engaging (though of course flawed, as he is) in that production as well, but I just didn't find Moses at all likeable or sympathetic (okay, fine, "O wort, du wort, das mir fehlt" was shattering), which I think may have shaped some of my reactions to the opera. I mean, it's not the production's fault, because they were clearly trying (and from time to time succeded); Moses is not supposed to be likeable or sympathetic, he's supposed to be above such mundane things. But it makes a difference because Schoenberg clearly expects us to buy in to Moses' philosophy, which is hard for me personally to do when I'm busy thinking, "Man, Moses is really a jerk." Plus which people aren't actually like that -- I mean, solely superhuman jerks! And apparently when I'm confronted with this kind of situation, my response is to try to figure out away to make the character understandable. Through fic!
So I set out to make him a protagonist such that I, at least, could see where he was coming from, without losing sight of the fact that he really is a brusque and unyielding sort of personality. (I am totally aware that this completely goes against the spirit of what Schoenberg was doing, by the way. I think that Moses, like God, is supposed to be not understandable. But if anything this only encouraged me.) But I had to transpose it to the modern era to make his character comprehensible. And then I was at work and talking to a coworker about the necessary evil of HR, and I wrote down in my yuletide file, "Aaron is SO HR! ...no, wait, Sales." and it just sort of snowballed from there. I wrote pretty much the entire draft in a couple of days, before I had more than the bare seeds of ideas for the other fic.
I succeeded in terms of my own reaction. I feel very strongly about the purity of science, about how it can't be compromised for the sake of how you feel about anything. And translating Moses' unbendingness into that milieu made me much more sympathetic towards his point of view.
Interestingly, I completely failed to communicate a major portion of this where
seekingferret was concerned, which makes me sad (not about seekingferret at all, only about my inability to communicate). Seekingferret wrote a very thoughtful and interesting critique of "Complexity" where he reads it as Moshe and Aaron on a more equal footing. In a certain sense he is right, and I will talk about that below. But in another sense, that is not what I meant at all! In "Waters," both Moses and Aaron are missing the point to some extent, which is not what Schoenberg meant but what I get out of it when I watch it. In "Complexity," Moshe is meant to be right. All right, there is a place for image in our imperfect finite minds trying to come to grips with the divine -- and I do believe that (in this world where the Tabernacle was built), and the first half of the fic makes that point -- but in both the central conflicts, the Golden Calf conflict and the Meribah conflict, Aaron is asking to compromise the idea for the sake of the image, compromise the scientific truth for the sake of getting the job done. The choice, when it comes down to the important choice, is between making something look good (the image) and the truth (the idea). And Aaron, in choosing appearances/image, is wrong, wrong, wrong; it is never right to compromise the analysis. You just don't misrepresent science, you must not, for your job or your friends or anything else. And I failed in not making this clear, because in my worldview it is so very obvious that Aaron is wrong that it didn't even occur to me that it might not be obvious to someone who isn't me and didn't know me. (Moshe is so totally my POV character in this one, despite Aaron being a lot more likeable. What he says about organizational theory? Is what I think about organizational theory. (Sorry if there are any organizational theorists reading this! Feel free to educate me!) And I'm a scientist/engineer by training/profession, and have my discipline's ingrained suspicion of HR and Sales and management (here I should append that my company has lovely HR, no sales as a separate department, and quite understanding management, but it doesn't stop all us engineers from being suspicious of all of them nevertheless). And Aaron talking about quantum correlations? Does not, in fact, make any sense. Oh, Aaron.)
The tragedy -- at least in my particular reimagining; here I'm departing from Schoenberg -- is that when Moshe unbends a little, tries to let Aaron in, when he tries to make that compromise because he does, after all, love Aaron -- that's the moment when we find that Moshe was right all along, that Aaron is wrong, that this compromise can't be made, and when you try to make it, it leads to disaster. As seekingferret says, Moses is right, but the world sets us up for failure.
Well, that's what I meant, anyway. Perhaps that's not what actually came out :)
I'm really glad he wrote that piece of meta, both because it made me aware of this flaw in my writing and because he speaks to something I hadn't thought about when I wrote it -- the Moses-God relationship. Which I think he's completely right about -- as written, the CEO is this shadowy figure On High. (Heh, "Christian New Testament God." Made me laugh. Guilty!) Because of ase's beautiful beta work, I don't think it is so much of a problem in the first half, at least to my reading, but it is somewhat glaring in the second half, especially in the characters' reactions to and aftermath of the pivotal scenes, and it didn't have to be that way. Is seekingferret's reading of M&A correct? I have mixed thoughts on this -- but the point is, it's something I didn't think about when I wrote the story, and I should have, regardless of what my eventual answer turned out to be. About that he was wholly right.
Part of the problem, of course, is that the conception of God is split between the CEO and Science (or math, or algorithms, I think is what the fic actually says, but I'm using Science as a catchall phrase). Although the CEO is intended to be the crackified (New Testamentesque?) persona of God, it's really Science, or the truth embodied by science, that bears the philosophical weight of the Moses-God relationship in the opera. Although I understood this implicitly while I was writing, I don't think I figured it out explicitly, enough to spend time thinking about what it implied in terms of the character dynamics and relationships (in particular, both CEO-truth and CEO-Moses). Ah well.
And now that I am thinking about it, I suspect there are a couple of parts I could tweak very slightly that could address these concerns and make everything work rather better, so why didn't I? Eh. Well, if I have seekingferret's permission and blessing, perhaps I shall.
Paean of praise to betas: "Complexity" did not have a Judaism beta (for fairly obvious reasons, but in hindsight, I should have gotten one).
elements_ao3 whacked the word choice like anything. mithrigil deserves major points for pointing out, "To be completely frank, this is more like 'if Schoenberg wrote bible fanfic instead of an opera and put all his kinks in it' than fanfic for the opera itself," and so have I summarized it. And, as I sort of said above, if I'd considered ase's critique more carefully, I might have made my point of view more understandable. To the extent that it is understandable, I totally have ase to thank for pushing me to that level.There, I should probably have written an essay instead of fics and have been done with it :)