Intro
Why do things happen the way they do? Why things happen the way they do? When David Mitchell had a minor character ask this question in Ghostwritten, I realized that I had to start searching for an answer again. (Otherwise, I would have to repeat this question ten thousand times a day.)
“Hi,” Sherry’s eyes turned toward my host.
“How’s War and Peace? I have to admit, I’ve never read anything by a Russian.”
“Long.”
“What’s it about?”
“Why things happen the way they do.”
“Then why do things happen the way they do?”
“I don’t know either. It’s very long.” She watched her breath mist the glass. “Look at this place. All this empty land, hardly anyone around. It almost reminds me of home.”
Caspar leaned against the window with her. After the train had gone another mile, he said, “Why did you come here?”
She thought for a little while. “It’s the last place, you know? Lost in Central Asia, neither East nor West. Lost in Mongolia—that could become a catchphrase. What about you?”
“How long have you been travelling?” Caspar asked, not wanting the conversation to sink.
“Ten months. You?”
“Three years, this May.”
“Three years! God, you really are an extreme case!” Sherry gave a huge yawn. “Sorry, I’m exhausted. Being cooped up doing nothing is really tiring. Do you think our two Austrian friends will have stopped their card game by tonight?”
“I just hope they’ll shut down their joke factory. You don’t understand German. You have no idea how lucky you are.”
Back in the compartment, the two Austrians were playing cards in stereo. Sherry bolted the door. The gentle rocking of the train lulled Caspar toward sleep. He kept thinking about Sherry.
Sherry peered down from the upper bunk. “Do you know a good bedtime story?”
Caspar was not a natural storyteller, so I stepped in. “I know one. It’s a Mongolian story. Oh, not so much a story as a legend.”
“I’d like to hear that.” Sherry’s smile threw Caspar’s heart into the wrong gear.
People blurt out: because A, therefore B, which eventually leads to C. Just like in science-fiction films: even if you travel back into the past, that will still lead to your present; all of your past has constituted, and will go on constituting, your present. This boring law of causality runs through an enormous number of films and novels, and whenever I see it, it makes me yawn. To me, the idea collapses on its own. There is no single logic running through the causal chain—countless random factors produce the chain you have posited, so how can you simply take the superficial causal relation for granted? Of course you can use this “truth” to explain everything. Oh, because A, therefore B. What? It was C? Fine, then because A, therefore C. This truth can never be wrong—but it is not the answer itself!
David Mitchell answers this difficult question from the perspective of a “ghost.” By the way, he is my favourite writer (quite possibly with no second place). A few days ago, I suddenly realized that I had somehow forgotten to properly study his debut novel, Ghostwritten. Being able to continue studying the work of this genius—especially his debut—made me quite excited. After finishing the first few chapters, I became even more excited: there are large amounts of Cloud Atlas and (my favourite) number9dream in it, throwing me back into that bizarre, experimental feeling I had when reading his work before. Mm. Like when your favourite film gets a prequel. Something like that.
Overview
Ghostwritten has no fixed protagonist. It adopts a structure of smaller interlinked stories somewhat like Cloud Atlas (but without the astonishing mirrored, Russian-doll experimental structure of Cloud Atlas). The characters in each small story are connected, in ways large or small, to those in the next; the chapters take place across multiple locations, are narrated by multiple voices, and remain loosely connected to one another, while characters and consciousness drift around the globe. We are not going to discuss narrative structure or any of those novelistic techniques I know absolutely nothing about. We will focus only on the chapter that raises the question: “Mongolia.”
In the “Mongolia” section, the “ghost”—the noncorpum—finally appears. This is the first chapter narrated by the noncorpum itself. Before solving the problem, we first need to understand this ghost: it is rather like a “soul” in the traditional sense, except that it can parasitize different human hosts, switching hosts through touch alone. When it is inside a host, it does not take over the nest and devour the host’s consciousness like something from a science-fiction film. Instead, it exists in something resembling a symbiotic state, while still being capable of altering the host’s behaviour. To outsiders, some hosts can therefore appear to exhibit something like schizophrenia-like symptoms.
When I first read it, I thought the author was doing another one of his narrative experiments. I even came up with a name for it: “1.5-person narration,” letting the protagonist’s second personality serve as a kind of half-observer. Only later did I realize that this was an incorporeal ghost capable of transferring itself through touch, and that the person I had taken for the protagonist was merely one of its briefly appearing hosts. Later, as in the dialogue in the first image, the author uses War and Peace to pose that unforgettable question:
Why things happen the way they do?
Summary
Before solving the problem, let us quickly summarize what happens in this chapter:
1.The noncorpum arrives in Mongolia with one of its hosts, searching for a story:
When he appeared in the tent of the Khan of Hell, the Khan of Hell was surprised. “Why did you leave your body while it was still breathing?”
Tava answered, “My lord, the living believe that my body is already dead. I came without wasting a moment to pledge my loyalty to you.”
The Khan of Hell was deeply impressed by Tava’s obedience. “I decree that your time has not yet come. You may ride my fastest horse and return to your master in the Land of Birds. But before you leave, you may choose one thing from my tent to take with you. Look: here you may find wealth, good fortune, beauty, ecstasy, sorrow and pain, wisdom, desire, fulfilment... Come. What will you choose?”
“My lord,” said Tava, “I choose stories.”
Tava put the stories into his leather bag, climbed onto the Khan of Hell’s fastest horse, and returned south to the Land of Birds. When he arrived, a crow had already pecked the eyes out of Tava’s body. But Tava did not dare return to the Dunes of the Dead, for fear that doing so would anger the Khan of Hell. So Tava had no choice but to inhabit his own body again and stand back up. Though blind, he lived to the age of one hundred, riding the Khan of Hell’s horse all across Mongolia, from the Altai Mountains in the far west, to the Gobi Desert in the south, to the rivers of the Khentii Mountains, telling stories everywhere he went, predicting the future, and teaching his tribesmen legends about how the land beneath their feet had been formed. From then on, Mongolians began telling stories to one another.
I decided to go south like Tava. If I cannot find clues in reality, then let me search for them in legend.
2.And this is the story from the “beginning of the noncorpum’s life.” It is also the key to solving the problem:
There are three who think about the fate of the world.
The first is the crane. Look at it, how lightly it steps between the rocks in the river! It thrusts its head forward, then tilts it back. The crane believes that if even one of its steps lands a little too heavily, the mountains will collapse, the earth will tremble, and trees that have stood for a thousand years will fall.
The second is the locust. The locust sits on a pebble all day long, thinking that one day the flood will come and drown the world, and that every living thing will perish amid violent churning, foam, and black waves. That is why the locust watches the high peaks and the rain clouds that might gather there with such vigilance.
The third is the bat. The bat believes that the sky will fall, shatter, and kill every living thing. So the bat hangs high above, beating its wings toward the sky, then toward the ground, then toward the sky again, checking whether everything is all right.
That was the story that surfaced long ago, at the beginning of my life.
This story of the “three” runs through the entire chapter and appears many times. The story is absurd, impossible to classify, and it bothered me for a long time. Later I realized that the answer is hidden in the story together with the development of the plot. Looking only at the story gives you only part of it.
3.After moving through the minds of many hosts, the noncorpum discovers an important clue: there is a professor compiling a collection of Mongolian stories, and because of the political circumstances of the time, he is being hunted by the noncorpum’s current host—a KGB agent. The noncorpum hurriedly sends the agent far away, transmigrates through several more hosts, and eventually reaches the body of the professor’s younger brother. While searching for the professor, the KGB agent returns:
The end. The Dunes of the Dead. Bones and stones with holes in them.
Far away in the flickering half-light, there is a motionless jeep. Bodoo’s brother parks beside it and turns off the engine. Someone is sleeping beneath a makeshift shelter over the back seat.
“Are you all right, stranger? Do you need help? Water?”
“Yes,” the man suddenly sits up, and I see his face. He is chewing gum. “I need your jeep. Mine seems to have broken down.” Punsalmaagiyn Suhbataar fires twice at close range. The two bullets enter my host’s eyes.
The host is killed.
4.The noncorpum is reborn in a baby girl, then continues transmigrating until it enters her father. While searching for the professor, it happens to see a newspaper report saying that the professor is dead as well (also killed by the KGB). At the same time, this father is told by relatives that his child is in danger; the noncorpum therefore has no choice but to return home with him.
5.The noncorpum wants to see for itself why the baby girl neither cries nor makes any sound at all, so it plans to transfer into her through the grandmother’s hand. But while the grandmother is its host, the noncorpum finally discovers the source of the story from the “beginning of its life”—the story of the “three”:
There are three, says the lama in the yellow hat, who think about the fate of the world. I am an eight-year-old boy. I have my own body! We are in a prison cell smaller than a wardrobe, with light entering through a barred window in one corner scarcely larger than the palm of a hand. Although I am not yet four feet tall, I cannot stand upright. I have been here for a week. I have not eaten for two days. I have grown used to the smell of our own excrement. In a nearby box, a man has gone mad and is wailing in a ruined voice. Through the barred window, the only thing I can see is another barred window on the coffin-cage next door.
It is 1937. Comrade Choibalsan’s programme of social transformation, copied directly from Joseph Stalin far away in Moscow, is in full force. Every week in Ulaanbaatar there are public trials designed to make examples of people. The Japanese are about to invade Mongolia from Manchuria, and several spies are executed. No one is safe. The Minister of Transport is executed for conspiring to cause traffic accidents. The dismantling of the monasteries proceeds methodically. First the taxes are raised higher than the sky, and then “re-education” begins. My master and I have been found guilty of indoctrinating people with feudal thought. The man who brought us water told us what our crime was the day before. I think that was yesterday. The lids of several nearby coffin-cells are opened, and the helpless people curled up inside are dragged out.
“I’m afraid, Master,” I say.
“Then I’ll tell you a story,” says the lama.
“Are they going to shoot us?”
“Yes,” says my master painfully. His teeth have been smashed into sharp fragments with a rifle butt.
“I don’t want to die.” I think of my mother and father. I can see their faces. My mother and father! They are low-status herders who worked themselves nearly to death just to scrape together enough money and connections to send their son to a monastery; five years later, their hopes have signed their son’s death sentence.
“You will not die. I promised your father that you would not die. You will not die.”
“But they killed the others.”
“They will not kill you. Now listen to me! There are three who think about the fate of the world...”
...
My master chants a mantra. I want him to stop. I am already numb with fear.
At the entrance of a tent stands a girl, making tea. Here, in this place, at this moment, seeing someone doing ordinary household work feels like a dream. My master suddenly stops chanting and calls her over. She hesitates for a moment, but still comes. No one is watching. Her eyes are large and her face is round. My master touches me with his left hand and her with his right, and I feel my memories being drawn away like fluid.
My master knows how to make me transmigrate! The knot binding my mind comes undone and begins to follow my memories away—but at that exact moment, a soldier violently knocks my master’s hand away from the girl. The connection is broken, and the girl is kicked aside.
The girl’s own memories piece together the final instant of my life. We watch the boy—myself—we watch my master chanting. Even when the rifle barrels are levelled—
Everything moves so slowly. The air becomes thick, hard. Every faint glimmer is polished bright. Someone gives an order in Russian. The gunshots crack like firecrackers. The row of men and boys folds and falls.
There is one more thing. Something the girl cannot see, but that I know how to see. The boy’s body also falls into the mud, his little skull smashed apart, but his mind slips its moorings and raises anchor. I can see it! Floating, pulsing. A mercenary walks over to the pile of bodies, kicking aside the corpses on top to make sure there are no survivors underneath. He touches the boy, and at that instant my soul leaps into its new home.
Later, this mercenary returns to China, to his home at the foot of his sacred mountain. It will be many years before that soul grows restless because it can no longer determine who it is.
That is where it ends.
This girl is the grandmother.
6.
“Of course I know you! For all these decades, I have carried the memories of your early life! Everyone in our tribe knows the legend of the Sect of the Yellow Hat. The day you were shot, when your master pulled us together, I knew what he was doing... I have been waiting.”
“It has been a long journey. The only clue was in my memory, and my memory was with you.”
“My body should have stopped working many years ago. I tried to die several times, but I was never allowed through...”
I look down at the baby. “Is she going to die?”
“That depends on you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My granddaughter’s body is your body. She was born carrying you as her soul and mind. She is a shell. If you do not return, her body will die within three hours. If you want her to live, you must choose to be bound by flesh and bone again.”
I think about what kind of future I could have as a noncorpum. There is nowhere in the world closed to me. I could search for other noncorpa, search for a community of immortals. I could transmigrate into presidents, astronauts, and messiahs. I could plant a garden beneath camphor trees on a hillside. I would never grow old, never become ill, never have to fear death, and never die.
I look down at the frail one-day-old body before me. With every passing minute, her metabolism grows weaker. The average life expectancy in Central Asia is forty-three years, and falling.
“Touch her.”
And the perfect ending:
Outside, a bat hangs high above, beating its wings toward the sky, then toward the ground, then toward the sky again, checking whether everything is all right. Inside, the howl rising from the hollow of the lungs I have possessed for eighteen hours fills the tent.
And with that, this poetic chapter ends.
The Explanation
The crane believes that if one of its steps lands too heavily, the mountains will collapse, the earth will tremble, and old trees will fall, so it walks extremely lightly.
The locust believes that one day a flood will come and drown the world, so it vigilantly watches the peaks and the rain clouds.
The bat believes that the sky will fall and crush all living things to death, so it hangs high above, repeatedly beating toward the sky, the ground, then the sky again, checking whether the world is all right.
Pt.1
According to ordinary thinking, this repeatedly mentioned story should apparently be the thing responsible for answering why things happen. So it is very easy for us to walk into a surface-level interpretation and a surface-level answer:
Things are a complex system formed by intersecting choices. And the reasons behind those choices—are strange and absurd.
This answer can explain a great many things, including the series of choices made by the noncorpum’s hosts: why the KGB agent kills without blinking, why the traveller ends up staying in Mongolia, why the professor and his brother are both killed, why the “me” of a previous life came to such an end—history seems to be the sum of the absurdities produced by choices. History, this complex system, is the result of vast numbers of neurons firing spontaneously, while those firings may be strongly related to the beliefs of the people whose neurons they are; and those beliefs are often as absurd as the locust’s vigilance.
Perhaps Mitchell is emphasizing the “interaction between the individual and the world” here? Is that what the “sum” means? The model we call the world, or history, does not have some causal chain at all. Like the oscillators in a whole-brain Hopf model, it is “driven” into oscillatory interaction by absurdity, while a feedback loop in turn affects the individuals participating in those interactions. The noncorpum’s perspective is precisely a kind of “God’s-eye” perspective from which this answer becomes visible—it is a medium detached from any single subject, allowing you to see the interactions and feedback from the position of an observer, together with the absurd noise mixed into them.
But—is that all? If I stopped here, I would think this was a pretty good little allegory. But I know Mitchell’s genius cannot possibly be limited to simply giving us a perspective from which we can see the answer. The deeper answer must be hidden in the narrative.
Pt.2
I realized that this simple answer had simplified away the most important layer of the story—commonality. I had reduced the shared error (or characteristic) of the three to a single cause, “absurdity,” so naturally the answer I got was also simplified.
At the same time, this answer has another crucial problem: what does it have to do with the textual narrative—that is, with what the author wants to express? Does the author really just want to write one of those loops made out of “coincidences” and “twists of fate” that were popular in Hollywood scripts of the last century, while scattering some sense of historical absurdity throughout?
Later, I returned to the commonality among the three. I went down the wrong road and thought that all three possessed a kind of mistaken sense of responsibility. Mm. At the time, I thought that was the commonality.
Why did I think of “responsibility”? Because at the end, the noncorpum seems to bind itself to the baby girl’s flesh out of some kind of sense of responsibility. Once you see it that way, there is a very clear and ingenious narrative “counter-linkage” (ah, I have never studied literature, so I can only invent my own term): a “counter-linkage” between the absurdity of the story and the noncorpum’s sense of logic (absolutely do not use the phrase “stark contrast”!). The ending is precisely the strongest evidence:
When an infinite and incorporeal responsibility contracts into a finite and concrete responsibility, choice moves from absurdity toward logic.
However, not only is this answer too shallow, it also has a fatal flaw—it is not an answer at all! The question is: “Why do things happen the way they do?” So what is the answer?
Does a sense of responsibility have some kind of dynamical pattern? Does it connect the absurdity and logic of choices? And are our responsibilities themselves also dynamically changing? (See the noncorpum’s earlier evils, such as killing.) All of this, ah, takes us right back to complex systems.
Whenever we cannot find an answer, bringing out “complex systems” is always correct. Why? Because the system is complex, countless neurons are firing, countless causes make those neurons fire, and countless causes lie behind those causes...
This rhetoric sounds strangely familiar: why? Because A, therefore B. The concept of a complex system is nothing more than a cover—a cover thrown over the causal chain so that none of its holes are exposed. It is still the same problem—truth is not the same thing as an answer.
Pt.3
This dynamical theory of responsibility, unfortunately, I think went down the wrong road.
Taking the novel’s most conspicuous features—its historical sweep and temporal span—we can rethink what the three have in common: worldview.
All three possess what I would call the embryonic form of a worldview—a private theory of their own. So what is their commonality? An experience-based worldview.
Under this framework, things suddenly look much more natural, and more things can be explained. Here I introduce a concept of my own invention (mm, I really like doing this)—world model. This world model is not that world model.
A world model is the world shaped by a subject through its worldview.
Let us understand that statistical scripture from another dimension—all models are wrong, though some are useful. A worldview is shaped by its subject; there is no single correct answer—all world models are wrong. This is the core of what the story of the three is trying to express: the experiential fallacy of world models.
Then what about the plot? What function does the plot perform? What is the plot trying to express?
My worldview is continually modified and replaced, ultimately achieving a kind of embodied redemption (there may be a great deal of embodied phenomenology in here; unfortunately, I do not know enough about it to discuss it in depth). Through the perspective of this incorporeal being, you can see history drifting and changing from one world model to another (this requires some foundation from the earlier chapters). In this novel, I very much want to compare history to a fish. And people? They are the river, the silt, perhaps even fish themselves.
Whether it is the absurdity of the three or the noncorpum’s final, logic-filled choice, both can be explained within the framework of world models; experience seems invariably fallible, while truth is a qualitative phenomenon emerging where world models overlap most densely; history, meanwhile, is the accumulation of both the overlapping and non-overlapping portions of these frameworks. In this story, the different world models of the hosts are made visible through the noncorpum; the noncorpum—as a God’s-eye perspective that absorbs world models—also has its own worldview continually reshaped, until finally it enters a logical truth.
Ah! Plasticity!
Pt.4
I happened to come across a sentence by Thomas Aquinas: “Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur.” (Unfortunately, I did not encounter it in a philosophy book. It was the epigraph to Chapter Three of Whole-brain modelling, which I am about to translate for the public account.) It means:
Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.
Roughly speaking: when something external enters a subject or system, the way it is received is determined by the receiver’s own properties, capacities, structure, and state.
I almost immediately thought of the most crucial link in this world-model theory: plasticity.
Aquinas could not have anticipated that, several centuries later, a genius novelist would use a particular perspective to “counter-link” this sentence: not only is the receiver itself shaped by “what is received”; “what is received,” as a form of consciousness, is also shaped in turn.
The plasticity of the world model affects worldview, and worldview in turn affects the world model. Where does this plasticity come from? I think that is something this novel has been exploring all along (not only in this chapter). You have to know that, at the beginning, the noncorpum was like this:
I was not always like this. After that doctor went mad, I transmigrated among the villagers, and I was their master. I knew their secrets, knew the bends in the village stream, knew the names of the village dogs. I knew their rare joys, which burned themselves out as quickly as sudden bursts of anger; I knew the memories that kept their hearts from turning completely to ash. I studied extreme states. In chasing the pleasure that hissed and crackled across the bridges of their nerves, I would drive my hosts almost to destruction. I inflicted pain upon those unfortunate enough to encounter me, simply in order to understand pain. I transplanted one host’s memories into another host’s head, or sang to them continuously without stopping, simply to amuse myself. I forced monks to commit robbery, lovers to be unfaithful, and Yin Qing and Gui to spend money like mad. The only thing I can say in my own defence is that, after my first host, I never killed anyone again. I cannot say that I did this out of love for humanity. I feared only one thing: being inside someone at the exact moment of that person’s death. I still do not know what would happen in that situation.
Answer
Back to the question:
Why do things happen the way they do? Why this particular trajectory—a trajectory that is neither predetermined nor simply in flux?
We now have a clear and concise answer:
The subject’s experiential plasticity produces fluid world models, and world models in turn simulate that sense of things happening “the way they do.” All models are wrong; fortunately, plasticity can rescue the trajectory.
I think this question also asks about “history,” so this answer is also an answer to history... one of them?