How Big Brother achieves total control in George Orwell's novel '1984'

In Orwell's 1984, the government controls the population through mind-reading and memory replacement. This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Feb. 10, 2014.

Writing in 1948 after the conclusion of WWII, the English novelist George Orwell imagined a futuristic society in which the government had total control over its citizens. This future world formed the premise of his celebrated novel "1984." Many people read it as a warning about the possible consequences of excessive government control.

Government

In recent history preceding the year 1984, the nations of the world merged into three superpowers. Britain, Australia and North America joined to become the empire known as "Oceania," and Oceania's form of government is called "Ingsoc" (short for "English Socialism"). This classification is not very helpful to the reader, as the government is sui generis. Oceania is in a permanent state of war, always against one of the two other empires, Eurasia and Eastasia, alternately. Meanwhile, Oceania's population is generally deprived of food and material goods. The government claims to produce goods, but somehow they are never distributed.

The powers-that-be are referred to as "Big Brother," but it is explicitly questioned within the novel, and never made clear, whether this is a nickname for a single person who actually exists or if it is simply convenient for the government to speak of itself as if there were a single leader above the maze of bureaucrats, control freaks, torturers and hit men. In London, where the story is set, the government is run out of four large government buildings: the Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love and Plenty. Unspeakably bad things can happen in these buildings.

Big Brother is able to read the mind of each person. A book forbidden within Oceania explains the role of mind-reading:

"The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand."

The mind-reading, and not the war, is the subject of "1984." How mind-reading is accomplished is a mystery, and that is part of what makes it so terrifying. An argument could be made that the mind-reading is achieved through sophisticated behavioral observation. This is certainly part of Big Brother's strategy, as two-way "telescreens" are installed everywhere, including in each person's apartment, and may not be turned off or avoided for any prolonged period of time. (Big Brother detects physical signs of furtiveness, guilt, confusion, shock or dissent. The safest facial expression is one of "quiet optimism.") However, it's never explained who is watching on the other end, nor - to raise the same question that skeptics have raised about God - how those people are cognitively able to watch everyone all the time. There are also grounds within the novel for hypothesizing that there is a supernatural element to the mind-reading, or that it involves some form of science so sophisticated that it appears to the modern reader to be supernatural.

'Thoughtcrime'

It is a serious crime to dissent or even to raise intelligent questions about Big Brother's intentions or machinations. Such heresies are therefore almost unheard of. They cannot be expressed, verbally or on paper, because Big Brother would instantly know about the crime through one of the telescreens. They cannot even be coherently thought, because one's mind is not private. Somehow, Big Brother knows. (This may have been a precursor to the plot of the 1961 Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life," in which even a small boy is able to thoroughly control the adults around them because he can read their minds and wield severe punishments.)

Image of a research participant with a 32-electrode EEG. © Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license on Wikimedia Commons.
This explains why there is no rival political party, and why government workers are said to work simply for "the Party," which apparently has no need for a name. There is an "Inner Party" and an "Outer Party," but this is not an ideological distinction; rather, it simply reflects an individual's status within the Party, with Inner Party members living a relatively privileged lifestyle. The hero of "1984," Winston, is an Outer Party member who lives seven flights up in a half-century-old apartment building, all repairs for which must be requested through a do-nothing committee. His allowances for food and clothing are meager. He is a "member" of the Outer Party only in the sense that it is his job to work for the government; he is not doing so by choice or conviction.

Winston speaks with an acquaintance, Syme, who makes indirect political critiques such as: "Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." Winston recognizes Syme's intelligence and thinks to himself that the government will not allow Syme to live very long, as "there was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity."

When the novel opens, Winston has just purchased a blank diary and a pen, the penalty for which is 25 years forced labor or perhaps death. (Most people who receive the death penalty are killed suddenly and are understood to have been "vaporized," after which the official position is that they never existed and are, in other words, "unpersons.") As a Party worker, Winston is not even supposed to shop at unapproved stores. He begins his unpracticed, stream-of-consciousness writing "in sheer panic." This is his way of dissenting. Recognizing that thoughtcrime was "the essential crime that contained all others in itself" and also that "the consequences of every act are included in the act itself," he wrote "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER" in capital letters, assuming that "the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary." Yet he does not want to be caught: "Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible."

Memory

The possibility of such a thing as thoughtcrime interferes with the usual notion of truth. Whatever Big Brother wants people to believe is what they must believe, or else they will be guilty of thoughtcrime and severely punished. Big Brother therefore is the arbiter of truth. And the only way for Big Brother to present a coherent narrative about the present day is to remove all threats of competing facts that are remembered from the past.

For example, if Big Brother finds it expedient for people to believe that Oceania is at war with Eurasia, then it must expunge people's memory that Oceania was ever at war with Eastasia, rather than Eurasia. What is true now must have been eternally true. Through influencing people's memories, Big Brother is able to control what they "really believe," not merely what they are allowed to say they believe. As an Inner Party member puts it: "We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull."

Winston understands this better than just about anyone. His job for the Outer Party is at the Ministry of Truth, where he spends his days reviewing supposed historical records and forging them anew according to instruction. "All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary," as he bitterly sees it. Identifying and correcting paper copies was a grueling task (Orwell did not imagine digital media). The characters referenced in Winston's stories may not have ever existed; the conflicts may not have taken place; the timelines may be off; the language may be anachronistic. Regardless, it is Winston's job to revise the records as instructed. It is the job of the rest of the populace to believe whatever records are kept by the Ministry of Truth; all competing reading material is forbidden. This is undoubtedly why keeping a diary, too, is illegal.

Winston is cursed with a good memory. He knows that what he's writing is, in most cases, false (or there would be no need for him to "correct" the record). Most people have trained their minds to forget immediately anything that competes with Big Brother's current narrative. Winston cannot forget. He is interested in the truth about things, and he knows this will be his downfall.

His gift for memory equips him for rebellion. As a practical matter, he is able to memorize addresses and instructions so that other people do not have to write them down or otherwise compromise themselves in sharing information with him. As he moves from keeping a diary to seeking out political dissenters, he recognizes that "he had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions."

Relationships

Winston's relationship with a younger woman, Julia, is one of the major plot elements of the novel. Unlike Winston, Julia is not interested in facts that contradict the Party's official version of events, nor is she interested in political theory. She is nonetheless a rebel insofar as she likes sex, something that is illegal. In this, Winston and Julia conspire together.

The Party grudgingly allows marriage only for the purpose of procreation and child-rearing. Winston and Julia blatantly transgress by escaping to a rural area, where they believe there is no telescreen, for the purpose of forming a relationship.

While willing to use adults for the effort of rearing small children, the Party destroys family ties by encouraging children to inform against their parents, and it conditions parents to believe that this is expected behavior. Winston experienced the sudden "disappearance" of his entire family when he was a small boy, and he has no illusions that, even if the Party would permit him to marry Julia, they would be allowed the sort of private enjoyment that they both want.

Torture

Torture leading to a forced confession is one of the more straightforward ways that the Party exerts control, as this activity has been used in the real world throughout all of human history. Orwell's gift here lies in his literary representation of the extreme physical pain and disorientation that Winston experiences under torture. He also draws the connection that physical torture can lay the groundwork for the goal of mental submission or mind control.

Conclusion

There are multiple layers of control in "1984." In the world of the future, as Orwell envisioned it, people suffer permanent war, chronic malnutrition, economic control, suppression of dissent, mind-reading, memory control, torture and forced confession, execution and the manipulation of family relationships. Any of these features may be read figuratively to represent struggles in the real world. Taken literally and in combination, they illustrate a world in which people have no freedom whatsoever.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

Oh No God

Hats off to Darby Conley, the "Get Fuzzy" comic strip artist, for today's strip finessing a problem of religious language among secular people.

Anyone could have done it, but only Darby Conley did, to my knowledge, as this is the first time I've seen it. Problem solved.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

A literary analysis of "The Cave" by Jose Saramago

Originally posted to Helium Network on Jan. 7, 2012.

A couple years after winning the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, Portuguese author Jose Saramago published The Cave, a novel about human connection in a time of uncertainty and uprooting. The book was soon translated from Portuguese into English by Margaret Jull Costa.

The plot elements are simple – a rural craftsman is taken advantage of by a large company, a stray dog shows up, a young married woman conceives, financial pressures force the family to move – and so the real impact of the novel lies in its psychological and philosophical explorations. The key to the story is in the emotional connections that characters make with each other tentatively. It's in Saramago's expression of how the dog noses his master's hand, how the girl tells her father she's pregnant.

The title evokes Plato's allegory about the human tendency to be captivated by illusions rather than to see truth directly. The surreal climax that gives the book this title does not occur until the last few pages of the story. Yet the entire book is, in a way, a reflection on the varying illusions contained in ordinary life and thought.

One of Saramago's literary tricks is to make lists of apparent synonyms. In one place, he writes,

"Yes, it is true, that no one ever saw him again, but he left us what was perhaps the best part of himself, the breath, the puff of air, the breeze, the soft wind, the zephyr, the very things that are now gently entering the nostrils of the six clay dolls..."

In another, he writes,

"But I've always understood that the secret of the bee doesn't actually exist, that it's a mystification, a false mystery, an unfinished fable, a tale that might have been but wasn't..."

Some readers are put off by this style. Can't one of the world's greatest writers settle on the proper word to convey his intended meaning? That desire for clarity is one of the very philosophical problems with which Saramago wrestles.

In one passage he explains that it is incoherence, not contradiction, that the human character generally avoids. A person is capable of believing and feeling contradictory things while still maintaining a coherent self-narrative. Saramago's lists of similar but non-identical concepts can be seen as illustrations of this principle. Is it breath or wind that ensouls the dolls? Does this side-by-side contradiction matter, especially as it is the province of metaphor and perception anyway?

Another justification for the lists is given here:

"…every now and then, one still comes across the occasional rare exception in this dull world of repetitions, as the Orphic, Pythagorean, Stoic, and Neoplatonic sages might have called it had they not preferred, with poetic inspiration, to give it the prettier and more sonorous name of the eternal return."

Eternal return is the philosophical idea, famously examined in modern Western philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche, that time is cyclical and everything that has happened before will happen again. Thus when Saramago says that his character "was busily planning ruses, tricks, ploys, stratagems, dodges, and subterfuges," he conveys the sense that this person is connected to every other person who has ever plotted deceit. The reader is not presented with a specific kind of deceit but rather with the vague impression of activities that fall into this category: the Platonic form of deceit. The specific character becomes universal and thereby eternal.

Another interesting feature of Saramago's writing is his representation of dialogue without line breaks or quotation marks. While this makes it difficult to interpret which character is making which comment, it reveals how an argument with another person can also be perceived as an argument with oneself. It shows how our contradictions live and breathe within us. We see how readily we can change our opinions to connect with others.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

'Change your thoughts': On the law of attraction

---

---

Relatedly:

For a college class c. 2000, we were assigned to read:

From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the therapeutic roots of the consumer culture, 1880-1930 by T. J. Jackson Lears. Printed in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. Ed. by Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. (New York: Pantheon, 1983.

For some reason — whether for a class assignment or for personal reasons — I wrote this summary and just came across it.

---

Also, this book criticized the self-help industry in part for "push[ing] people away from proven medical treatments by persuading them that they can cure themselves through sheer application of will."

Also, Jared Yates Sexton has this book about how certain American myths/illusions/inspirational metaphors have become cultish.

---

Before the 20th century, USAmericans believed that spiritual salvation came through self-denial, hard work, and temperance. But as the industrial and communications revolutions changed their world, they increasingly felt that the fragmented, impersonal capitalist society was "unreal," and they sought salvation through "reality" and "real life." This value shift rang truer to their experience. It manifested itself through religion — but advertisements also reflected it.

Lears calls the new value structure the "therapeutic ethos." People felt dissolved in masses of humanity. They felt stifled, shriveled, as if they had no self at all. Hence the popularity of an ethos that made the healing of the self its top priority. The cultivation of a healthy personality was every person's highest goal. If one lacked vitality, one wasn't enjoying "real life." The self could be healed by following an exercise regimen, eating proper foods, permitting oneself hedonistic self-expression, and buying the right products.

Advertisers seized upon the belief that fulfillment of deep yearnings was just around the corner. The public accepted the explanation that they bore the responsibility for their own depression, exhaustion, and demoralization because they had failed to buy the correct combination of elixirs. They were willing to take more consumer advice and to act on it.

Advertisers didn't merely respond to customer demands but also shaped those demands. They attributed the customer's vague unhappiness to specific consumer complaints which they could remedy. Consumers adopted those claims and used them to shape their own wishes.

Before the 20th century, the dominant Western worldview instructed each person to consider themselves a creature of pure reason and unfettered freewill. Of course, every person has a sense of emptiness, but according to this worldview, it was an obstacle in one's ability to redefine oneself — so if you admit to feeling any emptiness, you admit to a character flaw. Freud's late-19th-century theory of the subconscious allowed each man to relinquish some of that responsibility for his psychological and physical weaknesses. Advertisers happily took on the responsibility for the solution.

The Industrial Revolution was a stressful time in human history, and USAmericans expressed their sense of spiritual emptiness by buying products advertised to them. Dissatisfaction and depression appear in every age, but this explanation and proposed solution was unique to this period, as was the economic ability of the United States to produce and consume enough so that people could live out this "therapeutic ethos." The maxim was economic as well as spiritual.

---

Photo by Quick PS on Unsplash

"There is a form of social and political control implemented by medicine, a way to sever an unpopular minority [trans people] from their own bodies and then sell back limited access to their bodies if they will submit to a set of trials to prove they can be good people, or at least made better. The people opposed to that kind of medicalization simply think that trans people enjoy no right to their bodies at all, under any circumstances."

— Detransition is a Mythology, Jules Gill-Peterson, Sad Brown Girl (Substack), Feb 6, 2024

Believing everything is fine should be based in reality; it's the reality-base that elevates belief to thought. B. Lorraine Smith discusses it.

---

I have moral expectations of myself and others. It's fair to have them, and we need to set mutual expectations so that we can co-create a livable society. Moral expectations are not quite the same thing as "law of attraction."

---

JD Vance

Alissa Quart writes:

"Welcome to the Art of the Deal of the Hillbilly.

Trump for much of his career was alternately mocked, admired and amplified by New York’s liberal media. Like Vance, he also peddled what I think of as crappy prosperity populism. (Here we might ask whether all prosperity populism is crappy!) Crappy prosperity populism is the claim that all success is the result of an individual’s gifts and efforts, and anyone who tries hard can make it. It’s also the faith that this achievement is best measured by dollars and the ability to enter the highest reaches of society.

Finally, it's a contempt for the poor — in Vance's case, his own family members, who he blames for their condition. As Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy, of those he had left behind in Ohio, they were simply spending their 'way into the poorhouse.' 'People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown,' he sniped. 'You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.'"

— Alissa Quart, "JD Vance is the Toxic Byproduct of America’s Obsession with Bootstrap Narratives," LitHub, July 18, 2024

Here's another idea

Diane Aoki discusses the idea of "ontological design," meaning a focus on designing the real, shared space you inhabit, not only your inner world. Some people believe "that unless you change your self, and deal with the issues that are thwarting your emotional health, you will take your problems with you wherever you go. That is what ontological design argues against. It argues that your outside does affect your inside, so be intentional about the world in which you reside. Curate it."

The illusory truth effect

See this article: "Why do we believe misinformation more easily when it’s repeated many times?: The Illusory Truth Effect, explained." Decision Lab.

Agreed. Really starting to feel like rats hitting the cocaine button. It was productive for a while because it was helping cement the perception of him as a weird sex pest (100% true). But we’ve wrung the last bit of the illusory truth effect out of it at this point.

[image or embed]

— Aunt Sylvia’s Home for Wayward Women and Lurid Tulips (@socialistboghag.bsky.social) Jul 28, 2024 at 9:22 AM

Never admit error

Roy Cohn taught that to Donald Trump.

More

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

When conflicting perspectives are opportunities to learn about oneself and others

Multiple worldviews can be a source of conflict, but they can also be a path to peace.

One approach is to reconcile some of the gaps within oneself. Gish Jen wrote in Tiger Writing:

It is clearer from the book [Philip Kasinitz's Inheriting the City] than from this quote that life in a structural hole [a term coined by sociologist Ron Burt for the location between two cultures] is not an advantage in the way that, say, private school education is an advantage. Still, the larger picture this term describes, including both the ‘structural hole’ in which children of immigrants like myself grow up and the ‘creative selective assimilation’ that results, seems to me on the mark.

People who grow up in multicultural families or neighborhoods may be especially attuned to certain areas of discrepancy in worldviews or mores, but they are not the only ones who experience this potential source of anxiety and this opportunity for growth and insight. Everyone is exposed to uncertainties and "structural gaps" where they are taught contradictory or incompletely explained ideas.

After acknowledging the gaps within oneself, another approach is to reconcile with others. Richard Kearney wrote in Anatheism:

I like to think that the eventual formulation of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in March 1998 — permitting Irish citizens to be “British or Irish or both” — was greatly facilitated by the interconfessional and intercultural hospitality practiced by some of Ireland’s finest artists.

Here, a grassroots culture of acceptance and successful intercultural exchange is identified as being developed prior to a formalized political breakthrough. This is inspiration for self-empowerment; change can begin from the bottom-up.

Apparent contradictions can disguise significant opportunities for growth.

---

I'll share something from Roy Speckhardt, "How to Be a Good Blasphemer: A Humanist Guide to Courageous Critique" (TheHumanist.com, 26 September 2025)

"People can stand up to those who would suppress dissent and endanger humanist ideals by being a good blasphemer. To be most effective, before they blaspheme, they ask:

• Is this critique aimed at harmful behavior or doctrine, not at vulnerable individuals?
• Is it a genuine exercise in humor, satire, or free speech—not a veiled act of bigotry?
• Does it challenge power structures that use religion to justify oppression?

Blasphemy has the most positive impact when it isn’t targeting people’s faith, but instead, interrogates the ideas underlying many faiths that shield injustice or demand unquestioned obedience."

---

Sources:
Gish Jen. Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. p. 111.
Richard Kearney. Anatheism: Returning to God After God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. (Kindle edition.)

Part of what makes a history video educational, says historian Shae O. Omonijo, is that you can "check a citation or follow a thread on your own. Real learning needs that architecture, the quiet ability to trace a claim back to where it came from." Otherwise you experience "epistemic alienation."

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

Unreadable and mysterious written language: A look at ancient languages that still haven't been deciphered

Some scripts have not been deciphered. Some are so mysterious, it isn't even known what language they were used to transcribe. Originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 27, 2010.

Among the greatest puzzles in the world are the undeciphered scripts - ancient systems of writing that no one has yet been able to learn to read. In many cases, it is not even known what language is represented by such strange symbols. They are like secret codes that no human or computer has yet been able to crack. We can only wonder what mysteries of ancient life are locked behind them.
Here is a brief overview of a few randomly selected undeciphered scripts, organized from oldest to newest.

Vinca

This was a pictogram system used in southeastern Europe from 6000-4500 B.C.E. Short inscriptions have been found on burial sites.

Indus

Used in the region of present-day Pakistan between 2600-1900 B.C.E. Although there are thousands of examples of this script, no one has cracked it. It may have represented a Dravidian or Indo-Iranian language. About 500 distinct symbols are known, yet the longest surviving example strings only seventeen of them together.

Linear A

Used in Greece around 1800 B.C.E., it is related to hieroglyphics and uses relatively few symbols. (Linear B was once also a mystery but it proved to be a Cretan form of Greek.)

Tujia

Today the Tujia are a Chinese ethnic minority who trace their heritage back to the Ba kingdom (600-316 BCE). Their spoken language is in the Tibeto-Burman family. They were long believed never to have had a written language, but several ancient books discovered in Youyang County in 2008 use a script that resembles Chinese characters and may be Tujia.

Etruscan

The Etruscans lived in Italy around 600 BCE. Scholars are able to pronounce Etruscan words, and the "bi-texts" combining Etruscan with Latin or Greek have enabled guesses about its meaning. According to one writer, "Etruscan, as scholars know it, cannot simply be classified as belonging to the Caucasian, the Anatolian, or Indo-European languages such as Greek and Latin, from which it seems to differ markedly in structure." It has no surviving descendant languages. While Etruscan texts can be read for general meaning, the precise connotations of their words and grammar remains a mystery.

Zapotec

This system was used in southern Mexico from 500 B.C.E.-1000 C.E. Most inscriptions are less than 10 symbols and, although modern forms of Zapotec are still spoken today, the ancient language has been lost.

Meroitic

Dating to 300 BCE in the Sudan, Meroitic is the second-oldest writing system in Africa. One Meroitic script is an adaptation of Egypt's hieroglyphics (which is the oldest African writing system), while another is a 23-symbol alphabet including vowel sounds and a sign to divide words. The existence of this script was unknown in Europe until the 19th century. Today, these inscriptions can be decoded, but it is unknown what language they represent.

Runes

The Runic alphabet, often called "futhark," was used throughout Europe for magical inscriptions as early as the 1st century CE and especially during medieval times. Some people believe that it was created artificially rather than having evolved on its own. It may have been modeled on the Roman or Etruscan alphabet. The word "rune" means something akin to "text" in Old Norse and "mystery" in Old Germanic.

Isthmian

Also known as Mojarra or Epi-Olmec, it was used in Central America from about 500 BCE-500 CE. The glyphs are elaborate boxes and crosses. The language is unknown.

Pictish

The Picts lived in present-day Scotland in the 4th-9th centuries C.E. They inscribed symbols on stones, and no one knows whether this may have been a form of writing rather than art.

Khazar

This extinct language was used in Khazaria - the present-day region of Caucas, Armenia, northeastern Turkey and part of Russia - whose kingdom that lasted from 652-1016 C.E. It was related to other Caucas languages and used a slightly different alphabet.

Nahuatl

Modern Nahuatl dialects are spoken by two million indigenous Mexicans, but Classical Nahuatl, spoken by the Aztecs when the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century C.E., is now extinct and its glyphs have not been decoded.

"Voynich"

There is only one existing example from Central Europe, c. 1600 C.E. The hauntingly illustrated Voynich manuscript, named after the collector who acquired it in 1912, has never been deciphered. Many people believe the manuscript was created as a hoax.

Image of the Voynich manuscript by: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University ([1]). © public domain Wikimedia Commons

Rongorongo

Used on Easter Island, c. 1800 C.E. This script probably represented the Polynesian language Rapa Nui, but no one remembers how to read it.

These are just a few of the mysteries of ancient writing. Some of them may be solved one day. Others may rest in permanent darkness.

---

Computers may be able to crack the codes. A 2019 update: Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay from MIT and Yuan Cao from Google’s AI lab in Mountain View, Calif. developed a computer system that correctly translated two-thirds of Linear B cognates into Greek. Linear B was a test case because humans had already deciphered it. Given that the computer can correctly decipher Linear B, it may be able to crack the code of other scripts.

Alphabet Politics (paywalled). What prompted the development of systems of writing? Josephine Quinn. New York Review of Books. January 19, 2023 issue.

---

"When she died, Rachel Pollack had just finished her memoir.

However, we will never get to read it.

You see, she wrote it in notebooks in a special shorthand of her own devising that only she could understand. She had just begun the process of dictating it out to others to print when she passed away.

So, the woman who decoded the gender mysteries of the Tarot has left her life’s story behind in a code that no one will ever be able to decipher."

— Fay Wylde, "Remembering Rachel Pollack…“I Didn’t Know She Was Transgender!”" Prism & Pen, October 15, 2024

Read also: Symbols found carved into 40,000-year-old German artifacts may be precursor to writing, CNN, Feb 25, 2026

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

Learning to let go of the past in Eudora Welty's novel 'The Optimist's Daughter'

A plot summary of 'The Optimist's Daughter' by Eudora Welty. In this novel, an American Southern woman releases herself from the grip of her memories of her family.

Originally published to Helium Network on Dec. 6, 2013.

"The Optimist's Daughter" is a short novel by Eudora Welty (1909-2001) that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973. It follows a middle-aged woman in the American South as her father dies and as she copes with the aftermath of his death, finding herself left alone except for a heartless, foolish stepmother. The story is written in four parts. The first part is the father's long stay in the hospital, and the second part is his funeral. The third and fourth parts are devoted to the woman's memories of her family and to her redemptive realization that she can let go of her past.

Part One

Clint McKelva is a 71-year-old retired judge in Mount Salus, Miss. He has traveled to New Orleans, La. to see a particular eye doctor, Nate Courtland, a longtime friend. Judge McKelva reports having seen a fig tree while staring at a courthouse, and he says, "I was forced into the conclusion I'd started seeing behind me." Dr. Courtland diagnoses him with a slipped retina. Courtland prefers to delegate the necessary surgery to another doctor, but McKelva insists that he do it himself. He declares himself an "optimist" although he's warned the surgery is risky.

Two women have traveled to support McKelva: his forty-something daughter Laurel, described as "a professional designer of fabrics in Chicago," and his new wife Fay, a part-time typist who is perhaps even younger than Laurel and whom he married only a year and a half previously. Laurel's mother, Becky, is dead. The second wife, Fay, presents herself as a disagreeable, egocentric character from the moment of the diagnosis of her husband's slipped retina, as she cries: "I don't see why this had to happen to me." It seems that Judge McKelva still cares deeply for the memory of his first wife, as he asks for Becky, not Fay, as he wakes from surgery.

While waiting in New Orleans for Judge McKelva to recover, Laurel and Fay stay in separate rooms at a "decayed mansion" called the Hibiscus, a streetcar ride away from the hospital. One night, Laurel knocks on Fay's door hoping to acquaint herself better with Fay. Fay tells her that she had left Texas and come to Mississippi because all her family members were dead, and she implies that she looks down on Laurel for having left her father behind in favor of pursuing a career in Chicago. "Oh, I wouldn't have run off and left anybody that needed me," Fay said pointedly. "Just to call myself an artist and make a lot of money."

The judge – immobilized and bandaged across both eyes – shares a recovery room with another man who is blind and mostly deaf. A nurse, Mrs. Martello, watches over both patients. For weeks, Laurel reads Nicholas Nickleby aloud to her father in the recovery room. He weakens. One day, she arrives at the hospital to find a commotion between Fay and Mrs. Martello. The nurse is physically restraining Fay and bars her from Judge McKelva's room, claiming that Fay is "abusing" and stressing her husband during his recovery. Dr. Courtland immediately closes himself in with the patient and asks both women to stay away from the hospital.

At the Hibiscus again, Laurel tells Fay, "I believe he's dying." He does die, suddenly, without explanation. Fay screams, "You picked my birthday to do it on!" when Dr. Courtland delivers the news. Dr. Courtland's comments are regretful but not precisely apologetic; he seems to be frustrated by the medical case and sad more for himself than for his patient. Laurel and Fay travel back to Mississippi on a train that also carries Judge McKelva's body home.

Part Two

Laurel is greeted at the train station by six women who were bridesmaids at her wedding to Philip Hand. (Laurel is a widow now, her husband having disappeared in combat only a year after their marriage. She still wears her wedding ring.) These bridesmaids include the eye doctor's sister, Miss Adele Courtland, and Tish Bullock. Laurel and Fay are driven to the home that Judge McKelva shared with Fay. It is filled with Judge McKelva's friends who make affectionate comments about the departed man, such as "He was never sick a day in his life!" and "Can't believe Clint's gone for good." Fay cries, "What are all these people doing in my house?" That night, Laurel sleeps in the same bed she had slept in as a child, while Fay sleeps in her predecessor Becky's bed.

The next day, the funeral is held at the house. Mr. Pitts, the undertaker, reveals his cosmetic work on the dead man's face. Laurel prefers the casket closed, but Fay exercises her authority as widow to demand that it be kept open.

A broad cast of characters turn out to mourn the judge, who was a public figure in the small town. The mayor says of Laurel: "This girl here's surrounded by her oldest friends! And listen further: bank's closed, most of the Square's agreed to close for the hour of services, county offices closed. Courthouse has lowered its flag out front, school's letting out early." The mourners turn out platitudes and generally make buffoons of themselves, retelling funny tales of Judge McKelva's alleged antics as a younger man, which Laurel suspects are not entirely true. "I don't think that was Father," she tells Tish, in reference to an especially unlikely tale of bravado, and she thinks to herself: "The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much." Laurel has a more serious attitude during the funeral, but few of her thoughts are made explicit. She does say aloud: "He loved my mother." The judge is buried in the local cemetery, although Fay refuses to bury him near his "old wife."

Among the visitors are Fay's mother, who is referred to as Mrs. Chisom, and several of Fay's siblings. Mrs. Chisom elaborates that they are all still living in Texas. "Yes, me and my brood believes in clustering just as close as we can get," she says. This contradicts Fay's previous story to Laurel that her entire family was dead. One of Fay's sisters compliments the family on the "large crowd" that was drawn to the funeral, "without even having to count those Negroes." After the funeral, Mrs. Chisom asks Fay if she'll consider allowing the entire family to move into the large house she is inheriting.

Laurel calls Fay on her previous claim that her family was dead. Fay is nonplussed: "It's better than some lies I've heard around here...at least my family's not hypocrites. If they didn't want me, they'd tell me to my face."

Part Three

After all is said and done at her childhood home in Mount Salus, Laurel is consumed by memories of her parents that are triggered by the furniture, garden and books whose spines are colored with lamp-black and whose words she can remember hearing her parents read aloud to each other in bed. Someone has already cleaned out her father's desk. She insists on returning to Chicago, although some friends suggest that she stay.

Alone at last, Laurel discovers a chimney swift in the house. Anxiously pursuing the bird in the dark, she is flooded with thoughts: about Fay, about her longing for her dead mother. She finds her mother's sewing machine engraved with the year 1817, and then she is surprised to find her mother's personal papers intact. She recalls many details about her parents, especially that Dr. Courtland had removed a cataract from her mother's eye, and that her mother had subsequently suffered a stroke and spent five years in bed, disoriented, "in exile and humiliation," before dying.

Part Four

Laurel recalls parts of her brief marriage to Phil: their honeymoon in Cairo, Phil's work designing houses, his death by the kamikaze in the Pacific. When morning comes, Laurel enlists the help of a man named Mr. Cheek in catching the chimney swift, but he does not succeed. A woman named Missouri arrives and opines that the "vermin" bird doesn't fly out the open door because "they just ain't got no sense like we have." Laurel catches the bird and brings it outside.

Then, standing in the driveway, Laurel burns the family papers and books she has found. When Fay returns, Laurel accuses her of dirtying and damaging the breadboard that her husband had made for her mother. Fay replies that "it's just an old board" and "it's my house now." Laurel tells Fay, enigmatically, that her mother had predicted that Fay would come into her house someday. Laurel says she is taking the breadboard back to Chicago, and she lifts it out of Fay's reach; Fay accuses her of threatening to strike her with it, and Laurel admits to herself that "she had been ready to hurt Fay." At the last moment, she chooses to leave the breadboard behind as she departs the house, saying, "I think I can get along without that too."

"The Optimist's Daughter" is an unusual novel. It doesn't have an action-driven plot, and neither does it feel primarily like a character study given that the main character is so silent and challenging to understand. It is about a woman who, in loneliness and under unrelenting pressure, finally cracks and has a psychological breakthrough.

Illustration by Chester A. Reed, published in "The Bird Book," 1915 © Public domain in the United States.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

What makes print books special, compared to e-books?

Print books have certain qualities that give them an advantage over e-books. Chiefly, their permanence has great value, whereas digital content is more easily altered.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 12, 2012.

Books have long been considered objects of art. After the writing and editing is complete, serious publishers pay attention to typesetting, illustrations and even paper quality and bookbinding. An expert can recognize a printed book as a product of a certain era. Book lovers have long recognized that their tomes can be inscribed and given as gifts, and that the pages can be marked up with comments. Books can be passed down to the next generation or sold as valuable antiques. They can carry sentimental value. Many insist that the tactile "feel" of holding printed material in one's hand and the visual pleasure of scanning a page that has been painstakingly laid out cannot be mimicked by electronic media.

The rise of e-books has begun to change how people think of books. It is now easier to consider a "book" as its content alone, independent of the paper it may (or may not) be printed on. Ancient peoples, for whom books were rare and expensive, could not have dreamed of the kind of catalogues available today for instant download anywhere in the world. Consider the New Testament reference to the eunuch official of an African queen who traveled all the way to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage, a journey that must have taken months, and who was in possession of the Book of Isaiah, presumably on a fragile, hand-lettered piece of parchment. (Acts 8:26-40) What would he have thought if he had been told that, two thousand years in the future, an ordinary person would have the ability to carry over a thousand books on a single device in her pocket? There is no doubt that he would have been impressed, but wouldn't it also be reasonable for him to suspect that, as books become economically cheaper and easier to carry and store, people will no longer have the same sense that books are precious and holy objects?

With all that can be said in favor of e-books, they are simply not precise substitutes for print books.

First, purchasing a license to read content is not the same as purchasing a material object of art that is one's rightful property forever and can be given as a lasting gift. While some e-book programs allow the legitimate temporary loaning of content – assuming, of course, that the recipient has a compatible device or app – other programs do not allow the file to be transferred at all. When the devices finally become obsolete or the companies go out of business, there is a risk that the content will no longer be retrievable by the consumer.

Second, the digital economy is fueled partly by the money involved in storing data about what has been read and who has loaned books to whom. While the "book recommendations" made by computerized algorithms can be helpful, there can also be great value in the sense of lifelong privacy when a print book is bought with cash and then finally – secretly – passed on to a used bookstore or to a friend. Whose business is your choice of reading material? With print, it is easier to keep it your own business and not allow it to become some company's data point about you.

Third, print books are currently perceived as the friendlier format in social situations, given the current relative ease of lending them and given their visible covers. When someone on the train is reading a print book, others around them can see the title. They can form an idea about what is trendy or intriguing, and they can even strike up a conversation.

Fourth, when one has a copy of a print book, one has more certainty that it's substantively the same copy that other people saw when they read the same edition. The publisher's imprint serves as a trustworthy historical record that the book is "real"; this is why people cite sources. If necessary, a particular book could even be carbon-dated to prove how old it is. With e-books, readers have reason to be a little more skeptical: how can one know that someone has not changed the text in the file? Does a recently digitized text contain exactly the same words that one's parents and grandparents read? What may have been misinterpreted, mistyped or deliberately purged?

There is no one right answer to the question of whether print books or e-books are "better." Each format uses different material resources and may be priced differently, taxed differently, reach different audiences and be read for separate reasons. Even with the rise of personal computers and e-reader devices, there is still much to be said in favor of print books.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

A character analysis of Clytemnestra in 'Electra' by Sophocles

Electra is a tragedy written by Sophocles that chronicles a chapter of the ongoing difficulties of the House of Agamemnon.

Years earlier, Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter to the gods when it seemed that some supernatural force was preventing the Greek fleet from advancing. The girl's grieving mother, Clytemnestra, eventually killed her husband in revenge. (Her motive was complicated by the fact that she was involved with another man, Aegisthus, who helped her commit the murder and whom she subsequently married.) Three surviving children feature in the play Electra: the boy Orestes, the girl Chrysothemis, and another girl, Electra herself.


When the play opens, Electra is grieving the death of her father Agamemnon. Electra defends the sacrifice of her sister as having been necessary and she finds fault with her mother Clytemnestra for having killed her father.

Clytemnestra first appears onstage a third of the way into the play, at which point she delivers two monologues. She has only short lines for the rest of the play.

In her first monologue, Clytemnestra criticizes Electra for having started the fight between them. She defends the righteousness of her choice to slay Agamemnon on the grounds of a mother's love. She makes the somewhat strange argument that a different man could have sacrificed her daughter or else another girl could have been chosen; she finds it particularly repellent that Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter by his own hand.

Electra asks to be permitted to share her opinion, which Clytemnestra makes a pretense of being willing to listen, saying "didst thou always address me in such a tone, thou wouldst be heard without pain." After listening to Electra's complaint, she angrily vows "thou shalt not fail to pay for this boldness, so soon as Aegisthus returns."

Clytemnestra's second monologue is a prayer to Apollo foreshadowing her own death, asking that no evil come to her. She asks to enjoy prosperity in the company of her friends and specifically with only those of her children "from whom no enmity or bitterness pursues me."

A messenger then comes to announce the accidental death of Clytemnestra's son Orestes, who had allied with Electra in opposing their mother. Clytemnestra rejoices in a muted and conflicted fashion as it seems that her prayer has already been answered. "'Tis a bitter lot," she admits, "when mine own calamities make the safety of my life." She had feared that Orestes might kill her. "A mother may be wronged," she adds contemplatively, "but she never learns to hate her child."

As it turns out, the announcement of Orestes' death is a lie. Orestes soon appears and, with his sister Electra's approval, kills his mother Clytemnestra and his stepfather Aegisthus in revenge for their murder of his father Agamemnon. The victims are not given an opportunity to speak before they are killed. Clytemnestra only manages to shriek a few words of alarm offstage before her end comes. Her conflicted character does not achieve any sort of resolution or final apology in this play.

Article originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 29, 2011.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

Greek god punishes skeptics in Euripides' 'Bacchae'

The premise of the fifth-century B.C.E. Greek tragedy "Bacchae" is the god Dionysus's punishment of the inhabitants of Thebes for denying his divinity. He causes all Theban women to go into a mad frenzy and to run into the cold mountains, drinking wine, dancing to flutes and drums, ripping apart cows with their bare hands, and making the contextually odd declaration that Dionysus is a beneficent god of pleasure who helps people forget their sorrows. Pentheus, the new king of Thebes and a nephew of Dionysus's mortal mother, is annoyed by the strange cult and refuses to acknowledge the god. Dionysus appears as a mortal man to specifically punish Pentheus, and here the play begins.

The action is interspersed with quasi-philosophical arguments in which Dionysus' apologists and deniers alike are made to look slightly ridiculous. The chorus members are true believers and insist that worshippers, despite their bizarre and immoderate behavior, are pious and pure. They also make somewhat contradictory comments about wine's effect on sexual desire. The blind prophet Tiresias exaggerates that drink is the only way that humans can mollify their sorrows and he makes the dubious claim that alcohol doesn't spark sexual desire in chaste women. The cult's nemesis Pentheus pontificates from a different angle but he is not a credible moral teacher either. He alleges that Dionysian worshippers are sexually licentious and therefore deserving of imprisonment. Having heard a rumor of a male stranger who has come to town heralding the god (this stranger would be the god Dionysus himself in human form), and without even having seen him or knowing his name, Pentheus wants him executed.

When the servants of Pentheus arrive to capture Dionysus, he surrenders laughing, warning them not to try to subdue him any further. They ignore him. Dionysus releases himself from the chains, shatters Pentheus' palace in a storm-like event, and mocks the king by causing him to stab at a phantom image of an opponent. He also magically releases his worshippers from their chains.

The second punishment for Pentheus is humiliation. Dionysus prods the king to admit that he'd like to watch the Theban women in their drunken and possibly erotic dances. Officially Pentheus only wishes to put a stop to their suspected misbehavior, but there are overtones that his curiosity is not entirely for strategic purposes. Dionysus warns him that the frenzied women will kill him on sight, so - first reducing the king's mental clarity - he coaches Pentheus in disguising himself in women's clothes. He then speaks to the chorus and admits that his real goal is simply to have Pentheus embarrass himself in front of Thebes by parading in a dress. This may be in revenge for Pentheus' previous mockery of Dionysus as an effeminate man.

Dionysus's third and most severe attack is to place Pentheus at the top of a pine tree where he is totally vulnerable and attacked by the mad worshippers. His own mother, not recognizing him despite his protests, participates in his dismemberment and sticks his head on a pike. When she returns to the city, her father Cadmus gently wakens her from her fantasy and helps her to see that the head belongs to her son and that she has murdered him. The tragic death of the king affects the entire family.


The tale contains several important moral lessons. To the contemporary Greek mind, the surface interpretation may have been that of a cautionary tale about piety displaying the utter dependence of humans on the angry whims of the gods. There is, however, a deeper lesson in the extended example of how evil begets evil. Zeus impregnated Semele and killed her; her misfortune was compounded by her family's disbelief in her story; her divine son Dionysus goads the disbelieving king into deeper heresy, then congratulates him for fighting evil (drunken revelry) with evil (deceit), when the compliment properly belongs to the god himself for his cruelty and duplicity in leading the king to a hideous death. There is also a subtle warning at the end of the play about the risks of being overly concerned with honor. It comes to light that Pentheus had been trusted by his grandfather Cadmus as a protector of the old man's honor to the extent that he would initiate violence against anyone who had offended him. It cannot be foreign to the royal family, then, that the gods also have a sense of honor and will destroy mortals who ignore, deny, or malign them.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Jan. 4, 2011.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.